


a thing of beauty is a joy forever

by Hopie (hopiecat)



Series: here be monsters [1]
Category: Magic Kaito, Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Historical, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 15:33:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13504482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopiecat/pseuds/Hopie
Summary: Saguru Hakuba: Great War survivor, soldier, detective, dead.





	a thing of beauty is a joy forever

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OrphanText](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrphanText/gifts).



The Somme is an old disease, quick and gluttonous, chewing through the ranks of soldiers like the plague through Europe; and once afflicted with it, you find yourself there again, standing on the same banks, staring out over the same mine-studded field, breathing the same fetid air, and thinking, thinking, of the first push over the top.

There are fourteen men more in the mud than there were two months ago, and Saguru is running out of noble hearts to hold up against the German war machine.

His men are disillusioned and cold, sick of the dying, and sick of the sound of five-nines whistling over the top of trenches, bombs like fireworks setting off sandbags (propelling the corpses packed into the walls four five six feet along the trenches); sick of slophouse soup and weevil-packed biscuits; sick of beer that tastes like fog and the forgotten; sick of ice that creeps, ice that bites, ice that leaves limbs in stasis in the middle of nowhere.

But mostly, they are sick of Haig and his commands, and by God and fucking country, Saguru is sick of him too.

On the morning of the first push, he receives a telegram that tells him to gain ground, and hold it fast. In his quarters - much plusher than his men’s, because blue blood buys comfort in this upside-down world - Saguru reads it by the stub of a half-candle, and then burns it to ashes. This has been Haig’s plan for the whole of the Somme: gain the German defense, and hold it until reinforcements arrive, whereupon Haig will pat himself on the back, one foot resting on the graves of half a dozen men, and proclaim his own brilliance to anyone who’ll listen to the horn-toot of his voice. Saguru will not, because he has no intention of following this asinine plot, because he has no intention of leading his men into a massacre like the first battle of the Somme. When he dusts the letters’ ashes off the table, he grinds them into the pock-marked floor, puts his helmet on the right way around, and pretends that the messenger who brought it to him is a figment of his imagination.

Outside, a low fog crawls like a dead man; it stinks of desperation. He can see winking stars beyond the barbed-wire top of the trench, and beyond that, he knows, the moonlight glints on the ferocious muzzle of a machine gun Jack could dismantle in his sleep, but he has no clue how to get to without using his men as a shield, and (their faces come to him in dreams sagging splitting broken aching and he can’t think for the screaming their screaming a multitude of last words spilling out across his brain until he thinks only in final moments) _no never again_.

Footsteps to the right of him and Private Wilson’s smile wobbles when he sees him (eighteen years old and he should be chasing bonnie lasses but he walked twice around the block and so he’s nineteen and so he’s here and so he has three fingers left of five on his right hand and so Saguru receives letters from his mother begging him to keep her son safe which is only marginally more acceptable than letters asking for details of glory) and, “guv.”

“Good evening, lad,” his voice has hollowed over months of being here; he’s lost the highland lilt, and Saguru cannot remember the last time he spoke Japanese, or if the language has stuck in his head, or if it’s been washed down shell-holes with the rest of his men’s blood. “Quiet night?”

Wilson’s back straightens like a poker, and he relays things like a gramophone record, his voice cracking into a man’s at the height of his syllables: yes, it’s a quiet night; no action reported on the front; the sodding Krauts appear to be asleep, sir; are they going over the top tomorrow, sir?

The answer is always ‘no’. In Saguru’s head, and because he leads this regiment, the answer is always ‘no’. They won’t go over the top. They’ll try and free themselves from this hell, cut through the forest to get to somewhere safer, and then --- he doesn’t know. He’ll be tried for incompetence or shell shocked (locked in with the rest of the broken men into a room too small at Craiglockhart screaming about the rats and the mud and the Germans with their toothed rifles) and the rest of his men scatter to the winds, other regiments, recycled back into the flow of death and death.

“In a manner of speaking,” says Saguru, and he bums a cigarette off him in exchange for a bottle of good whiskey, and smokes it inside his tent, looking over his ink-spattered map, and thinking, thinking. If they cut to the end of the trench and go up, then there’s a breath of a chance they could access the German trench from a relatively unmarked angle, far enough away that it would be increasingly hard to hit them.

The smoke whirls around his head as he marks another ‘x’ near the spot he thinks they’ll come out (makes a note to send in the tunnel diggers and their canaries), and then sits at his desk to read through Jack’s letters again. Jack’s stationed at Ypres, doing a better job at his command than Saguru can dream of; he’s only lost two men, but he hasn’t followed Haig’s directions, and, _there’s a Chinese bloke here who could scare the fucking pants of the Kaiser if he got close enough, and that’s my goal; wish this fucking war was over and we could go home; I’m starting to forget what the old bastard’s face looks like. Tell me what you’re up to_.

Pen in ink, and he writes, _I’ve lost three more men this morning to gangrene, there isn’t enough food to go around, I’ve had orders to send more men over the top, I’m close to being relieved of my command, I hate how useless my words are here, who the fuck thought this was glory and goodness?_ Scratches it out and writes in code for the eyes that pry over his letters (even with his medals, he has blood that comes from the Orient, and that makes him a ‘ _sodding untrustworthy Chink bastard, no offence, guv, just the lads would want to see someone English leading the men, yeah_?

_At this point, the men would like to see a Field Marshal with a better battle record_ , tart and sharp the way his Kyoto mother taught him).

A crush of footsteps in the gloaming, the pulse of a cigarette light, a voice from behind the canvas sacking of his tent: “are you awake in there?”

Lieutenant General Rhys Arden; six two brown hair falling in mop curls over his brow fog-grey eyes and never a hair out of place; military blood going back sixteen generations, his family’s family’s family bloodied on the fields at Agincourt, leading the march against Cromwell, involved in everything in between. Poked his head in, smiled at him.

It wasn’t animosity in his stomach, it wasn’t, but he didn’t know what it was either. Took a breath of putrid air, pushed his chair away from the desk, and said, “report.”

Rhys stood on patrol most nights; had a knack for it, for rousing the men before bombs or gas or a surprise attack, never seemed to freeze or lose fingers, never seemed to find himself at the wrong end of a bayonet (and Saguru knew what they said about devil taking the shape of a beautiful creature).

Something flat and cold hid behind his eyes, and every so often, it gleamed out at him like a hungry animal.

Two second pause, air and silence.

“Nothing moving, sir,” said Lieutenant General Rhys Arden, closed his fingers behind him and together, “saw a few lads with cigarettes. Better go and tell them not to smoke.”

“Only if they light three cigarettes with the same match.” The base of his skull screwed on too tightly, and he reached behind him, pinched the nape of his neck, stared at a map with lines like ants, moving, moving, moving, and them in the same place, never moving, always mired; in that moment, he envied that map more than he envied sun and air and light for being.

Rhys behind him, suddenly; his hands on him, suddenly, cold from the fog, cold from the air. A whisper of words at his ear: “what’s on your mind, _bete noire_?”

“Pet peeve,” said Saguru, but his voice shook, and the warmth blindsided him like a stray cat invited indoors; his brain circling around itself, tail in mouth, devouring itself in detail detail detail Rhys’ hands on his shoulders his mouth against his ear a hot puff of air of air of air so sweet it stung, “is not an appropriate nickname for your direct commander, Lieutenant.”

Rhys’ smile against his neck. It could draw blood, was that sharp, was that fine, was that brutal. “I do not see you protesting, Lord Hakuba.” He said his name right; precise inflection, curved syllables like music, almost-Japanese.

“General Hakuba,” and his throat had gone dry, somehow, and his brain was on how long it had been since he’d been touched, and the other side of his brain remembered that just this morning he’d identified the butchered remains of one of his soldiers. Cold washed through him, and he drew away, turned to look at Rhys, drank him in (every carved-glass detail: the curve of his bow mouth, his eyes like cliff-stone, the way he moved with a panther delicacy), and said, regretful. “I think you should leave.”

A flicker of animal meanness in his eyes, and Lieutenant General Rhys shrugged his expansive expressive shoulders, waved one arm to the gapped tent door, and said, “out there, all there is for you is carnage and bloodshed and misery. It is never to leave you alone, bete noire. Wouldn’t you like a break from misery, even just for a night?”

Beyond the tent limits, over Rhys’ shoulder: the brutalized tops of the barbed wire fencing around the sandbags, men in their bunks dreaming of England, the taste of rotten flesh on the air so pervasive that it took mustard gas to clear it out (became the last smell on earth); a hundred pairs of eyes waiting for him in pensive thought, a hundred more souls to add to the blood on his hands (indirectly there, but still there).

The weight of the world was heavier when noticed. Saguru’s shoulders slump, and he takes a staggering step back; feels like a marionette on chunky string, dragged towards a gleeful child. Rhys’ smile widens, shark-like; there is blood in the water, and he is chum for feeding.

_Come to me_ , his eyes invite, and Saguru cannot think of a reason to say no, can only think of Private Wilson and his thready smile, First Officer Katsuki and the mile-long scarring on his back from two days in enemy territory; Private Thompson who he shipped back to his family in a metal tin; of the others, lists of lists of names, every man in his command, dead, or dying, or damned, relaying in his head like numbers to a child. He only stops thinking of them when he sleeps, and wouldn’t it be nice to sleep awake for a change, to take what Rhys is dangling in front of him?

His hunger feels apparent, and Rhys’ laugh feels like silk.

Saguru breathes in deep, and lets it wash over him, wake him, remind him where he is. Tangling with men - tangling with Rhys - is danger he doesn’t need.

His mind should be on survival and escape.

“Thank you for the offer, Lieutenant General,” says Saguru, and when they stand toe to toe, he can see Rhys is a fraction taller, a breath wider, a decade older than he is.

Rhys jitters on the spot like his words are coals, waiting for the end of that sentence, for a promise, for something that Saguru cannot give him. When it isn’t forthcoming, his nose wrinkles, and there’s a smile on his face that’s half-frozen, half-waxed. He inclines his head. He disappears into the smudgy dark, silhouetted black against the smoggy sky.

 

 

It is two days before Rhys makes the offer again.

On the cusp of dawn, Saguru has his men dig a tunnel underneath No Man’s Land (he marks it as a 50% chance of success, and double-triple-quadruple checks their bright-breasted canaries). Shelling makes the morning edgy, and one of the tarps has split the night before, exposing a four-month-old corpse in a three-month-old sandbag; the smell permeates the entire eastern block of the trench. Mud sloshes underfoot from spitting rain.

The men in the tunnel are buried when a landmine goes off, and Saguru does not know their final words. He digs into the earth bare handed; he does not find traces of them.

His nightmares are suffocate him, and in them, the earth screams.

In the afternoon, another message arrives from Haig, ordering his men over the top. Haig marks it with three exclamation points; a further transgression, and he’ll be removed from command, and shunted off to one side, and the blood he’s prevented from spilling will gutter out of his command and into the earth.

He orders them to put on their helmets, and meet in his tent for a briefing, which consists of a prayer, a command at the frightened ones to leave, to turn back, to hide, and an order for the remainder to load their guns up tight. He puts on his helmet. He polishes his buttons. He wears his blood-bright coat.

Saguru is the first over the top, and this is the moment where the world spins to a juddering halt: there’s nothing happening in the distance that he can see, only a sea of sandbags and the tops of bobbing helmets, and the cruel, pointed beaks of machine guns. Clouds shift overhead, but he is frozen; the mud underneath his shoes is immobile, and sixteen precise seconds heartbeat by while he takes in the fetid air, and the death-swollen ground, the silvery spots where landmines sleep, and the crawling heat of a sun trapped behind perpetual clouds. There is a drop of rain on the end of his nose.

From across the trench, he meets the eyes of someone who looks half-asleep, just as mud-covered, just as starved. He looks like Jack: the same pale eyes, and skin like fresh cream, and the same long, blond hair. He looks like him, a mirror image made flesh, but for the round, blue eyes, but for the blocky jaw, and the stature that speaks of good European breeding.

The German soldier opens his mouth, and things happen very quickly.

Saguru moves forward, at a zig-zag, which makes him ten percent harder to hit, but in no means impossible. Bullets wing past him, at screaming velocities, and as he scrambles through the mud and earth, his brain tries to comprehend that speed, that mad rush of metal in air, and how it must feel to go flying. Somewhere behind him, a mine explodes, and chunks of earth ( _please God let it just be earth)_ rain down on his head as he skids behind a rock, fumbles the rifle off his shoulder, and nocks the viewpoint on a soldier machine-gunning the trench they’ve come from. The angle is wrong, and Saguru knows he only gets a single shot, and not a very good one at that, but he breathes in deep, and holds the air inside him like a bomb; lets it go with the release of the trigger.

He imagines he can hear it: a whistle, underneath the whistling, louder, louder; the crack of it against bone, tunnelling through like a fist through paper. His skull crumples; he disappears; one machine-gun falls silent, and the rest redouble their efforts.

Out of the corner of his eye, Tommy is crawling belly down, and appears to be the nearest one to the trench; he can’t see the others, prays that they’ve scattered, and not met their fate at the end of a wrong step. Rhys is ahead of him, his glossy hair peeled back against his skull, and he moves so quickly, he’s a haze, a blur, a blink too fast.

Saguru throws himself into the mud as a grenade sails over his head. The thump sounds distant, but the heat-pressure hits him like a truck, and he tumbles forward and into a ditch, scattering bones of dead men past.

It’s a slog, after that. The machine guns are immortal, and they’re lucky there aren’t any tanks. Tommy dies from a misjudged shot; Alan takes out three soldiers, and gets shredded by a round of bullets; Benjamin makes it to the other side, and disappears from his view. Saguru prays he’s safe, prays the rest are safe, as he inches through mud, shoots, inches through mud.

He wonders how far beneath him the tunnel diggers are, and if they’re screaming along with the Germans and the guns, and the English soldiers dying in their hundreds.

 

 

At night, the machine guns fall silent, and Rhys pokes his head up from the sandbags on the wrong side of the field, and shouts the all-clear.

It doesn’t feel real to be standing there, and to hear no shelling, to hear no shouts of ‘gas’, to have the machine guns finally mute. He sways on his feet; tiredness suffuses every cell in his body, until the air is bitterly not enough, and he feels like he could fall forward, and not get up until forced. He makes himself walk, aware that he looks like nothing on the recruitment posters that hang in dizzy-spun dozens all along the walls of Yorkshire houses.  

Rhys meets him, one foot on the back of a dead German soldier, smiling, holding out a hand to him. Saguru does not take it; feels as though human touch of any kind would crack him right down the middle, and leave him swirling in pieces in the air.

The offered hand rescinds, and Rhys steps back to let him take his first tottering breaths into their territory.

“Congratulations, General,” he tells him, and inclines his head in that way that should mean so much respect; from Rhys, it comes across as gallant enough to be slimy, as problematic. Saguru doesn’t like the taste it leaves in the back of his throat. “You’ve made it.”

The laugh surprises both of them; it burbles out before he can stop it, and in the depth of nothing, it echoes, echoes, echoes, far and wide and everywhere, echoes into the trees, echoes into the grounds, echoes where those poor dirt-drowned bastards can hear it: Saguru Hakuba, finally losing his grip on himself, finally shuttling off to join the mad thousands at Craiglockhart. His vision hazes grey, and he collapses onto one knee with a cracking, sparkling pain that’s almost enough to snap him out of it -- and keeps laughing.

_Made it_ , he says, with enough of his tongue in his cheek to make it deplorably bright. _Made it_. They’ve made it, the two of them, two sole men in a ragtag contingency of twenty, thirty. The rest of the men, where are they? He feels incandescent; he feels spinning, spinning, and the laughter keeps pouring out of him to the point where he’s breathless, and it’s almost worth it to see the way the smile slides off Rhys’ face, and the worried hand that hovers over his back, and how he says, “ _General,”_ like it means something outside of this fucking emptied Hell.

It is three minutes before Saguru gets his breath back. His brain finds solace in numbers, and counts down the seconds while he wheezes to silence, while he can’t, he can’t, he can’t, laugh anymore.

Then he wipes the tears off of his cheeks, smearing his face with mud and bone dust, takes a breath that feels too big for him, and says, “not a resounding success, wouldn’t you agree?” He cocks his head; it is the two of them still, and Saguru knows the score, now. The rest of his men - the ones who took to the top like fish to worm-bait - are gone. Or very nearly gone. He might find some of them, if he’s lucky, bloodied out, and gutted like a hunting deer; if he’s very, very quick, he might get them bandaged, might coax them to live for a few days longer while the rot sets into their bones and their flesh turns spongy and green and porous, and everything they’re fed dribbles out of them like air out of a pricked balloon.

It would be safer, quicker, better still to put his rifle between their eyes, say a prayer for their souls, and blast their brains out to the mud, but---

_I am not God,_  he thinks, in the same breath as _but is anyone_?

Rhys’ joy has drained out of him, and that flat, black look in his eyes returns. “It’s something,” he says, kicking the dead soldier at his feet; his brains are seeping through a pocket-sized hole in the back of his helmet, and for a second, Saguru feels profoundly sorry for him. He hasn’t asked to be here anymore than they have.

Then he thinks of Tommy, crying for his mammy with his legs gone, his voice wavering and wavering and wavering to silence, and the little pity he has shored up inside him dissipates. He wants to tear them to shreds, every last bastard one of them; and this is how the army chews you up, and ruins you, and turns you into something beastly.

There is no glory to be found here.

Saguru lets the anger simmer, and slides down into the trench. It’s better equipped than theirs; dryer, but no prize. All of those men lost for nothing, but it’s something. He can send a message to Haig, and tell him, _your fucking prize cost us forty men in total_ , and he is certain that the message he will receive will say something along the lines of, _they died serving their country_.

Did they bugger _fuck_.

“Do a rudimentary sweep,” says Saguru, without turning to look at Rhys; his eyes are pinned to a poster hung crudely on the side of the trench wall. “Take any survivors, and tie them together. Remove their weapons. Don’t kill them.” Satisfaction flushes through him; the war hasn’t yet ripped away from him the need to be kind, the need to be soft. “Do you understand that, Rhys?”

“Perfectly,” says Rhys, and his voice speaks volumes, but Saguru has no time to decipher all the pauses and the breaths in it. “Don’t kill any of the murdering sods. What else?”

“Get the rest over here.” The poster shows a woman sitting astride a machine gun; her hair is curled and primped and fluffed to within an inch of its life, and she looks so perfectly in sync with the weapon that there’s no prizes given for what it’s supposed to be. “Get them settled in.”

Rhys’ hand phantoms onto his back, and his touch is fleeting, brief; a touch of warmth before the rain and the cold drive it back, before they both leave.

 

 

At night, Rhys visits him with a bottle of good whiskey, nearly drunk down to the very last dregs, pours him a mugful, and doesn’t take his ‘no’. He pushes it into his hands, and the stink of it - bubbling up from the cup like sweet manna - sinks into him, sticks into him. In that moment, Saguru doesn’t think he’s wanted anything more.

His mouth waters for a taste of it, but he refuses to; he is not Rhys’ pocket pet, to be tugged along by a treat, and kept docile with a pat on the head. Sharper than the whiskey, crawling underneath the tiredness, is a wicked little voice that points out he looks delicate to these white men, he looks pushable and soft.

“Hard day, guv,” says Rhys, all good-boy charm and sweetness. “Moved everyone in alright?”

Saguru sets the mug down onto the table with a ‘clack’. It’s possible that he’s jumping at shadows, taking things too literally, that he’s pushing an agenda that Rhys doesn’t necessarily feel onto Rhys himself. It’s possible that he has too many enemies in his mind, and he’s finding some way to bucket them all together into something that’s easy to defeat.

“As much as I could, yes,” he says, and his voice sounds snappish to him, in the middle of this tent, in the middle of this fucking empty tent, in the middle of this trench. He can’t stop thinking about the poster on the walls, the little accroutrements they found of life: pocketfuls of hard cheese, a small booklet of poems, letters from Mum stuck somehow to the reverse side of a pillow. Flecks of life, drowned in mud and bloodshed; each side grafting to kill the other side. For a moment, it makes him so tired, he wants to sink out of his flesh and into the earth; he sways on his feet.

Rhys seems to notice, but his eyes hold no softness. He looks at him, and sighs, like he’s thinking of saying something, and then he is closer than Saguru can remember him ever being.

(but his memories before today are shoddy, have run together from too many times seeing the same thing, and yet, and yet, and yet, every moment is sharp, when he ruminates on it for longer than a couple of seconds).

He smells like whiskey, and that should be laughable. It’s France, it’s rainy, it’s damp, and they’ve been at war for so long, it feels like there was nothing before the war - and yet Rhys smells like whiskey and cigars, and a hot shower in the middle of the night after a walk that went on too late. It crooks his mouth up before he can stop it.

Rhys’ voice gentles as he asks, “what’s so funny, guv?”

“You,” says Saguru, with the bluntness of his Kyoto mother addressing a roomful of British women who are under the assumption that the daughter of a Japanese heir would know no other languages but the one she was born with. “You’re funny.”

Rhys blinks, and then laughs; hitched, quick. “Well,” he said, “that’s me, sorted, then. Good bye, good self esteem. Hello, plunging depression.”

That makes his smile twitch wider, and he half-hates it, half-loves it. “If it was that easy,” says Saguru, “you’d have walked out on me within a day of meeting me. Was it you I called a ‘blithering idiot’?”

“Probably,” says Rhys, with affable generosity. “I do have a touch of the blithering idiot about me.” He thickens his voice to sound like an approximation of the old school, his London accent turning Etonian, and a mixture in between, “’I say, old chum, what’s this shiny thing in me hands then’?”

He laughs. It feels good, coming out of him; it feels like he’s himself for the first time in months, his head clear, his mind on something other than the next step, the next hour, the next morning. It feels there’s an end to this coming.

“Very apt,” says Saguru. “I’m sure that’s what you told me, too. Or something along those lines, at any rate.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” said Rhys, “hadn’t used one of these ghastly things before. They’re horribly barbaric. What’s wrong with a knife, that’s what I say.”

(in the back of his head, there’s a voice that crops up, sometimes, and whispers to him that he should pay attention now; Saguru hasn’t listened to it ever since he stepped right instead of left, and and James took a bullet to the shoulder because he had to nip around him).

That isn’t funny, and the smile slips off his face again. He picks up the whiskey, swirling it in the hideous ceramic mug, watching it puddle, ink-black in the shadows; and when he lifts it to his mouth, and sips at it, it burns going down, like a mouthful of candlefire.

Rhys’ face blurs from that burn, and when he wipes his mouth and passes it back, it’s almost like there’s something triumphant in his eyes.

“I’m so tired,” says Saguru, to kill the silence. He meant to say something else. He meant to say something else. Why is is that that was the only thing that came out -- _I’m so tired --_ when he could have spoken about today’s victory, about finally getting here, about their next steps, about something that didn’t drag his bones down just saying it?

But when he opens his mouth to say one of those things, one of those beautiful gilded things, nothing comes out; those things are for poetry books, and he is hollowed out of any beauty. There is nothing left in him that hasn’t been scarred.

Rhys’ fingers touch his cheek. Touch his mouth, with a thumb, skating across his lower lip.

“It’s a crime for someone so beautiful to sound so sad,” he says, and if it wasn’t here, if it wasn’t now, if it wasn’t after everything, Saguru could have laughed in his face, and then promptly pushed him off. He doesn’t play these games with men in a position to destroy him - it’s not like high society needs any more potshots at his character.

But it’s different in the middle of a battle. It’s different when the last warm touch he knew was a medic’s, from patching up a minor graze on his abdomen that blew another soldier’s head to mush.

It’s different, so different, when his mind is buzzing on empty, and he needs, needs, _needs_  something to keep it busy before it tears itself open looking for something new to think about.

Saguru’s eyes twitch towards the tent’s door anyway, and he doesn’t allow himself more than a partial lean into his hands. He doesn’t allow himself to touch Rhys back - it would make it too real, and the mistake he’s about to make isn’t real enough yet.

He doesn’t, absolutely doesn’t, sigh when Rhys strokes his mouth again; he doesn’t light up on the inside, and arch into his touch. It’s the ground being unsteady beneath him; it’s the ground shifting, and breaking beneath him, the earth heaving with its dead. The tent isn’t warm, he just contracted something from the blood spatter outside. He’s having an anyeurism, and that’s why his whole body is sparking from a touch to the mouth.

Rhys’ eyes are very blue, and nothing should be that blue.

“There isn’t a lot of happiness to go around here, is there?” says Saguru, and it comes out such a soft whisper, even he almost doesn’t hear it, and isn’t sure he’s spoken.

The noise Rhys makes is partly assent, partly question - question for what, Saguru doesn’t know, because in the next instant, their mouths are together, and he can’t think of how it happened. The earth must have shifted, he thinks, grasping hold of his shoulders as Rhys lifts him off the ground; he must have blinked for a second too long, near passed out, and Rhys was only catching him so that he didn’t sink to the floor like canvas sacking---

Rhys has him against the bed. He’s looking after him, he’s looking after him, _this is nothing this is nothing this is nothing_ , thinks Saguru, digging nail marks through the terrible uniform, rending the medals from his right breast pocket and sending them scattering like stars. Against his mouth, Rhys grins, then swears, and drops him bouncing on the pallet-crate bed, which creaks alarmingly underneath their combined weights.

He grabs hold of a fistful of manky hair, and pulls it taut, running his mouth away from Rhys to taste the sweat and the bitter dirt underneath the curl of his ear, grouted into the hollow of his throat. Rhys hasn’t showered; it’s filthy to be doing this, God knows what they could catch, but (he’s had his faceful of death every day since, and he’s walked out with nothing but scratches and bruises and boxes of dead men; this feels like evening out the odds, somehow) Saguru doesn’t care, can’t care, can’t think.

It’s brutal, how Rhys tears his uniform to pieces; a man shouldn’t have that unholy strength. It’s brutal, how he pins him to the bed, their hips together, bucking together, pleasure layered on pleasure layered on pain where his bruises meet the edges of Rhys’ hip-bones, rub up against the flat of his stomach. It’s brutal how wet he is for him already, dripping down the length of his cock, puddling against his thigh; how Rhys, in the pallid light from one paltry fucking candle, looks like something divine. Between his blue eyes and his halo of wild curls, he’s the closest thing to sacred Saguru has seen in these fields, and he burns with the need to claim him, to possess him. His head feels stuffed with cotton wool; he can’t think, but for Rhys above him, pinning both arms above his head, holding him immobile as he kisses along his throat.

His blood jumps, then sings. It’s stupid, this is so stupid. The men could come in at any minute, ruin him, ruin them both, send them scuttering back to a court-martial, where it won’t matter, and he’ll tear apart the rest of his family, and he’ll go down in history as the depraved Oriental with a taste for men (but then there’s Rhys’ hand sneaking down low, and finding his cock, and Saguru makes a noise like he’s finally dying, drops his head back hard on the brick-stiff pillow, and swears he sees light flashing underneath his eyes).

(and the little voice in his head nags at him, insistent, and pin-sharp, _something’s wrong something’s wrong get him to stop get out get out get out_ , like part of his hind-brain is screaming at him to move; Saguru figures that his head is so overfull on terror that every small fear feels like a nightmare, and he shuts it down; buries himself, instead, in the pass of Rhys’ hands, and the bubbling heat, and doesn’t open his eyes).

He cries out, staccato-pulse heartbeat going mad in his chest, and it’s too good, it’s too good, he has to---And before he can tell Rhys, he’s gone, spilling over into his hand, and against his belly, hot and thick and God, he needed that, he fucking _needed that_. His head’s still wrecked on it, trying to wring out every droplet of pleasure, and his breath goes ragged like he’s run the lenght of No Man’s Land with a brimful pack. He can feel his limbs trembling. Imagines the scene above them, himself flat on his back, and Rhys watching him with a hand on his cock, working him up like there’s nothing to do but to milk him dry, and leave him to it.

Saguru opens his eyes, and finds Rhys staring at him, wide-eyed, transfixed on him. Not blinking, barely breathing - he looks like a man who’s stumbled upon a Van Gogh in his basement.

“Get off it,” says Saguru, and if he flushes, he’s sure the light will hide it. “I can’t be the only person you’ve seen like this, no?”

Rhy makes a noise in his throat. It’s half-growl, and it’s something that could be a yes, and that’s good enough for Saguru, who finds it funny, funnier than the knife comment, funnier than anything today. So he laughs. He laughs, and drops his head back, rolling his flaccid cock back into Rhys’ hands.

When he clears his throat, croaks out, ‘beautiful’, Saguru laughs again.

And then -- he’s not sure what happens, if it’s the light hitting Rhys wrong, but he notices his teeth. Had they been that sharp before, that long? Stuck out that much?

(The little voice in his head that tells him to sidestep this landmine duck right this moment run and never look back is screaming, screaming, screaming, and he can’t hear himself think over it; Rhys’ eyes look blood-shot, from this angle, the vessels in his eyeballs stand out like gilding; they’re red, entirely red, red as blood, red as sin a man can’t have that much red in his eyes without going blind).

“Rhys,” says Saguru, or begins to.

Rhys smiles, and his teeth are longer than he ever imagined, the full lenght of one of his fingers. His jaw drops open impossibly wide, and it takes him two seconds to hear the blowback of his voice, a hiss so low and soft, it doesn’t sound like anything but wind.

“So beautiful,” says Rhys, and dives down.

Saguru lashes out with the first thing at hand - a poetry book he keeps by the side of his bed, cracking it over his skull, and he hears the bone go, and he hears Rhys laugh, and then there’s pain - aching and sharp, a drill of pain spreading out from the bottom of his throat to further and further and further out, and the light dances above his head, and he wants his mother, he wants his mother, he cries out for her.

But nothing answers him, everything in the trench has gone to sleep or been slaughtered, and that is how Saguru Hakuba dies: alone, sobbing for his mother, in the country that God forgot.

_Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori_.

 

 

There’s hunger, first.

It gnaws, it rages, it is, deeper and more nuanced than any other feeling; it’s all the shades of hunger all at once, the starving child in the middle of the dust-drought, the old man with an empty fridge, the sailor and his handful of crumbs to whet him through the three-month trip, the heiress and her mouthful of blood and strawberries while her servants fry mice and fleas for their supper. There’s hunger, and it ruins him, it lulls him, pulling him out of the dark with yawning teeth, tugging at him like a needy child, _listen listen listen listen_.

Saguru’s eyes fly open, and there’s been a mistake. It’s dark as death in his tent, and then he realizes that it’s not his tent at all; he’s been taken out of the trench, put somewhere that it unfamiliarly dank. It smells of moss, and forest-deep. There’s so much silence, it’s a palpable thing, brushing against his flesh like whispers.

Is he alive? His last memory --- he presses his hand to his chest, and feels nothing stir, but that is only natural, is it not? An elevated heartbeat would be noticeable, but if he is sitting calm on his bed --- on someone’s bed --- then there’s nothing to feel.

He hasn’t taken a breath in many seconds. He takes one now, deep, deep, of dank and stagnant air that smells strangely perfumed, like he can glut his appetite on air alone. His eyes adjust to the dark, and he counts the things he sees: a pretty dressing table in white wood and gilding, a full length mirror that reflects the ceiling and the bed, a wardrobe big enough to hide an army in. There’s a chair by a window, and sunlight at the curling edges of its drapes, and the glint of like is enough to remind him that he has a pounding headache, so he looks away from it. Candles in their thousands dot around the floor; the room is full of shadows, and none of them look familiar.

It has been months since he last slept in a bed, since he last saw this sort of view. And where is Rhys?

Rhys. The name bites, and Saguru fists his hands in the downy blankets, makes himself get up. When he finds him, he’s going to--

Wait.

The mirror, in the corner, is angled towards the bed. It reflects it, draping canopy and velvet curtains, and curlicued feet.

It does not reflect him.

“A trick of the light,” he says, to hear his own voice. It sounds deeper than he’s used to, hoarse like he hasn’t drunk in years. His mouth tastes of ash, but it reassures him - he’s not dead, then. Just in an unfamiliar place, in the dark, with a headache so pronounced, it deserves a name.

He’s still dressed in his battle best. The clothes hold onto him, shreds of familiarity; he feels the chink of his medals. Someone has removed the silver ones, leaving behind only gold; how odd. When he touches his fingertips to his chest, he feels the gaps where the rest should’ve been; the bite of cold metal is reassuring. Whatever else, he has all his senses. He can hear. He can see. He can feel.

He can smell the candlelight, and it strikes him that it’s beautiful, like this, in the dark, but why bother with the candles, and not with the window, tantalizingly close? He should open the drapes, but when he reaches out a hand towards the curtains, his headache redoubles its efforts, and Saguru has to sit down until the wave of nausea passes, and his cramping stomach doesn’t feel like it’s trying to digest him, skin and bones and all.

When he opens his eyes, the mirror faces him again, and the surface is blank, blank, blank.

He gets up, and moves towards it; reaches out to touch the surface, half hoping it will disappear through it, and prove it nothing more than an empty frame. In his youth, there was a magician who made his fortune that way; decieving the audience, trick by trick, and it’s only his name that he remembers, because it was such a shred of home, he carried it with him still: the Ghost, _Kaitou_. There was an act with mirrors; he remembers this too, and how pleased of himself he was to figure out the act behind the magic (a false backing, glass on a hinge that responded to a light touch to whip around and reflect nothing but the audience), how he wanted to share it with his mother, who hated magicians, so they could have something in common, finally have some source to share.

But this is not a parlour trick, and when his hand presses against the glass, it sits firm, it does not move, it does not show him.

He is, for all accounts, not visible. Once the possible has been eliminated - that this is a trick - then what is left has to be the impossible, the improbable - that something has happened to rob him of his reflection.

There are stories that Mother has told him about mirrors and empty spaces, but Saguru is an educated man, not a frightened child; the mirror has not stolen his soul, the mirror has not dropped him into a reverse Wonderland. There is something more at play here, something that Saguru can only feel along the edges, but understands exists.

Footsteps on the stairs stop him, and he drops his hand from the mirror, and retreats to the bed. Until he has further information, perhaps the best thing to do would be to feign ignorance and sleep.

The covers are silk. How long has it been since he has felt silk?

The door creaks open and he leaves his eyes open a dreamer’s slit, watches as Rhys enters the room, carrying a lumpy bag of items. He watches him approach the window, touching the curtains with lover’s fervour, but not opening them more than a crack, and when sunlight spills into the room, he leans away from it with a snaky hiss.

He’s dropped the bag in the corner, and it wriggles feebly, soaking the floor beneath it wet and slick. It takes a second for the scent to hit him: copper pennies and fruit left to moulder in a shut-up house, the overripeness of a bouquet of flowers long-since dead, the smell of sunlight on metal, the chemical burn of sweat. It slicks his mouth up like a feast, and he’s drooling before he can stop himself, and Rhys suddenly stops, looks at him, watches him.   
  
There is no further point to pretending that he rests, and Saguru yawns, and makes as if he’s just rising, blinking his confusion, knuckling at his eyes. His eyes slide around the room like he hasn’t memorized it already (barren and empty, French-style furniture in a farmhouse - a mirror and a dressing table long since abandoned, a bed with silk on it, some forgotten prince’s residence).

He leaps out of bed, staggers away from it, spins, paints such an expression of terror on his face that it must pluck at whatever strings Rhys has left inside him, for he comes to him, and takes his hands.

His hands, which feel cold, which feel nothing.

“Shhh,” says Rhys, calm and gentle, soft, a horse’s whinny of a noise, “Shhh, pet. It’s okay.”

‘Pet’ makes him think of the brutish men his father brought home, who look at his mother, look at him, and make jokes about servile Orientals. It sticks to the roof of his mouth, and he’s scared he’s going to slap the word right out of Rhys’ mouth, throw away the faint and helpless act for one shining moment of retribution, of vengeance, of rage.

It is harder, harder, to choke it down than Saguru imagines it would be. Temper doesn’t come easy to him, and it leaves him without effort, but this slides along the surface of his brain, suffusing every inch of him with insult.

“Where--what---” Saguru swallows; the parched throat is real, at least, and adds believability. “Rhys, where am I? What’s going on?”

“You’re safe,” says Rhys, in that soothing voice, that frightened-animal voice. His hand touches Saguru’s cheek, stroke along his cheekbone like he’s thinking of taking it for himself. “I know you must be so confused, so --- awfully lost, but please, do believe me when I say I had your best interests at heart.”

Saguru hasn’t heard anyone say this to him, and instinctively distrusts it. His grandfather never spoke of ‘interests’; his mother never spoke to him at all. This smacks too much of control.

“I--I, yes,” says Saguru, and places a hand to his forehead, to soothe his drumming skull; that part is genuine, like the tremor in his fingertips. “I---Okay. But please, explain to me --- what’s going on? Why am I here? And why can’t I---?” His eyes dart to the mirror, and it strikes him, then, that it can’t be a trick mirror.

Rhys isn’t visible, either. Where they are both standing, where they should be reflected in the glass, is empty.

The floor tilts beneath his feet, and Rhys tucks an arm around him and takes him back to bed. Saguru goes with him, sinks into the mattress before his legs (realistically and theoretically) give out, and looks at Rhys, who seems uncomfortable for the first time in his history of knowing him.

“I would have thought it was pretty obvious,” says Rhys, more a murmur than a sentence.

“I’m afraid it isn’t,” says Saguru, and military-terseness cuts his words short and sharp. “Please explain what’s so obvious.”

Rhys looks at him like he’s a particularly dim-witted child, and says, “why, you’re dead, of course.”

There’s a second that Saguru lets slide by, sure that Rhys will bellow out a laugh, manifest this as one of his jokes, maybe even throw open the door so that the other soldiers in their unit burst in and make fun of their leader.

Nothing happens; the door remains resolutely shut, Rhys’ eyes remain resolutely on him, the mirror reflects nothing but the room behind them.

It feels like he’s teetering, balancing on cliffside edges, and whoever’s going to speak first will fall arse over tea-kettle into empty space. Saguru has been there before; hanging over the void in Dover when he was a child, the toothy sea below chewing the cliffs to dust, and he knows the freefall well.

Saguru breaks the silence first, and in his head, he hears a rushing wind, sees the bottom of the ocean rushing up towards his face. “Are you out of your sodding mind?”

Rhys’ nose creases delicately at his swearing, and the oblique look he gives him is laced with something like pity. “I--”

But now that he’s speaking first, he’s broken the silence, Saguru can’t stop his tongue from spilling over, saying, “are you expecting me to believe that I’ve died? From --- sodding _what_? Overexertion?” The last thing he remembers is Rhys’ teeth, his red-rimmed eyes, the curious plunging heat of a mouth against his throat, and his body emptied of lust; it comes to him in second bursts, filling every corner of his brain with mildewed tent walls the smell of sweat and come warmth layered over pain layered over warmth.

“I suppose,” begins Rhys, thoughtfully, “that that’s one way of looking at it.”

Saguru can’t keep his lips from curling at the edges, the sneer out of his voice when he tells him, “And this hardly looks like heaven, does it?” In a wave of his hand, he encompasses everything that there is in this room: walls heavy and broken behind their brocade curtains, wallpaper peeling away like mustard-gas skin, the bed broken on one side and stacked up with sodden books.

Rhys never looks, never takes his eyes off him. He smiles, and it’s a wolf smile, and Saguru is not used to feeling like a rabbit, but for a second, all he wants to do is bolt out into the light, all he wants to know is how he could have looked at Rhys and seen him as harmless, a pet dog without teeth, a bird to preen and hover by his window.

“Every place can be a heaven,” said Rhys, “with the right people in it.”

It’s the sort of trite comment that Rhys would have made before, but there’s an edge to it, underlying and sinuous, that tells him, whatever else, he believes it. Whatever he is, and what led him to this place, this moment, Rhys believes it.

_So play with that. Run with that_.

Saguru lets his shoulders slump. “I just --- I don’t understand,” he says, and it helps that his voice cracks a little; he can see Rhys’ smile narrowing, the hunger in it sharpening. “What’s going on, Rhys?”

Rhys leans over and his fingers touch his cheek. They’re cold. They’re cold enough that it hurts to feel them. “I’ll explain,” he tells him, “I’ll explain everything, but patience. Patience.” The fingers on his face dent his cheek with scratches; he feels himself bleed, and the night before flickers through his mind like smoke (the pleasure Rhys’ eyes widening in the dark his dagger teeth and pain pain pain). His stomach rolls with nausea, and Saguru has to keep himself anchored where he is for the sake of Rhys, for the sake of finding out what there is inside his head, what he is. He still expects the door behind them to burst inwards, and his men to march in and mock him, and handcuffs to be slapped onto his wrists; he expects a court martial for his interest in men, for his flagrant disrespect of the rules; he expects anything but Rhys standing in front of him in a plushly ruined room somewhere far away enough that the bombs area dream noises.

And Rhys won’t give him that, he knows, because it’s too much all at once. He’ll eke his information out when he’s behaving himself, morsel by morsel, teaching him to fall into line until he’s half in love with him.

He isn’t stupid, despite what his family name draws to it. And he remembers how carefully patterned this thinking is; he remembers how it hurts to be on the cusp of understanding and have it dragged away from you, left reeling in the dark, dark swell of incomprehension.

Rhys leaves him standing there, and steps around him, going to the squirming sack in the side of the room. Saguru watches him, watches the way he moves, every step measured, designed like the parts of a submachine gun; it’s an artificial walk, restrained and poised for maximum beauty, and in that moment, he’s so sick of artifice, it’s all he can take not to stride across the room and backhand him across the face - to leave a mark on him that’ll make him genuine.

He wants it so badly, his vision blurs from it; he can almost hear the snap-crack of his hand against flesh, Rhys’ outrage, the egging taunt of his father in his head, ‘a real man wouldn’t let himself be treated so poorly are you nothing but a bastard child?’ and his mother telling him in quiet asides that there would be men in the army just like his father and he needed to be better and stronger and sharper than they were.

The sack opens, and Saguru’s rage drains out of him; his mouth drops open, and he’s not sure what he can say to make the moment less --- surreal.

There is a man trussed up in canvas sacking, his face bloody and bloated from a beating that had to have happened sometime in the last few hours, his wrists together. One wild rolling eye stares up at him like a petrified animal’s, and somewhere between the tangled hair and the purpled flesh, Saguru recognizes him - it’s Billy, from the infantry division, his last sight of him a skimming look at the back of his head as he ducked down behind a rock. Billy, who has a wife and two young children somewhere in the south of York, and an accent that could glaze sunroof tiles; Billy, who barges into his tent at all hours to get him to come drinking with them, provided that he donates the whiskey, and tells them stories of growing up in the north of Scotland, where his only company was sheep and the men that loved them.

(Or, or, some nights, coaxing him to tell them about the other place, Japan of foggy memory; long roads hemmed in by buildings and women in bright-bird clothing, and music flowing down from on high; they ask him to speak in his language, and Saguru sings them songs his mother sang in the privacy of their nursery, not to comfort him, but to remember: there is a better place than England, there is something more to us than English blood and English horrors.)

“Bill,” says Saguru, and it comes out a croak; he skitters towards him, and hits the ground hard, wrenching off the ties around his wrists, the gag put alongside his mouth. Billy spits out blood and phlegm onto the ground at his side, and says something too rushed and jumbled for Saguru to decipher.

“Fucking hell,” says Saguru, and uses a strip of the same gag to wipe the blood from his face, “Rhys, go find some water, fuckin’---Bill, it’s alright, it’s alright, shh, you’re---”

Rhys chuckles, then, and the noise drives ice into him.

“Sir,” says Billy, through fat lips and a swelled nose, “sir, sir, listen to me---”

“Ah, ah,” says Rhys, and reaches down, catching hold of Billy’s jaw, and squeezing so hard, Saguru hears the plaster-crack of bone, “we aren’t telling any secrets, now, are we?”

“Rhys--” says Saguru, and clamps his hand around Rhys’ wrist, trying to drag it loose from Billy’s face, “Rhys, you utter bastard, let him _go_ \---”

He doesn’t know who hits who first, but he’s halfway across the room in a blink, and then Rhys raises Billy up - incoherent, broken-jawed, screaming Billy, excessively thin now that the rations have been downed again. Saguru looks around him for anything, anything he could use, and settles on a vase, hideously ugly.

But he’s not quick enough, and he’ll live with that sound forever: Billy’s last, gurgling scream, wet and viscous, as Rhys bows his head to his neck and tears out Billy’s throat. Blood sprays across his face, far enough that he can feel hot red drops scattering against his jaw, and Saguru drops the vase, hears it clatter, hears it skitter.

Rhys is --- is drinking. He’s drinking from Billy, his jaw and mouth working like an addict at a wine bottle, dripping and slickly red. The front of his shirt is ruined, the rest of Billy shudders and jerks, and when Rhys drops the body to the floor, it lies there still twitching.

Saguru has seen dead men dance before; it’s part of his job as a commanding officer to never let one of his lads die alone, but this is perverse.

Rhys wipes his hand across his mouth and makes a face. “Inadequate,” he says, “but even a terrible moonshine has its place in the world.”

“What---” he thinks he might be sick. Blood and brains and broken-in skulls he can handle; the horrors of a post-gas attack he can handle, but this, this threatens to upend his stomach all over the grotty floor of this Parisian hell-house.

Rhys ignores him, kicking Billy as soon as he stops twitching, and then dipping his fingers into the torn-open hole in his throat.

He’s in front of him quicker than any man can move, and Saguru can’t step back. There’s the curtains at his back, and the burning heat of light makes him twitch for reasons he can’t understand; it’s belly-deep terror, and Rhys is insignificant next to it.

“You have to understand,” says Rhys, “that this was never my intention, darling boy. I wanted to take you when you were young and fresh and innocent -- but you had to go and join the war, didn’t you?”

Somehow, Saguru thinks the crooning overlay of his voice is not quite as affectionate as Rhys wants him to think. He doesn’t move as those fingers come close to his face, as they smear Billy’s life-blood over his mouth like whore’s paint.

Rhys’ eyes look cold and dark and dull, and Saguru thinks of deep water, and the things that hide there.

“So I had to run after you,” said Rhys, “make sure you weren’t marked up -- brutalized. A man’s only a man, after all, darling, and beauty is so important, wouldn’t you agree?” He cocks his head at him, waiting for an answer.

Saguru badly wants to spit into his eyes, and tell him he could take his beauty, and choke on it.

“I would,” he says, instead, and makes himself lean into Rhys, away from the window.

Rhys’ eyes light up with pleasure, and his other arm goes around his waist, manacling them together. For one wild second, Saguru thinks of leaping back, bursting through glass and wood, and sending them both plunging to the ground, but that would solve nothing, would it? It wouldn’t do anything for Billy, who came here, and died horribly for nothing.

“And so I’ve waited,” said Rhys, preening over every word, “I waited, and I waited, for the right moment to turn you -- and I was so surprised, really, because at your stage of life, beauty is supposed to dwindle, but you---” Rhys laughs, effusive and bright, “---you get more and more beautiful every time I open my eyes.”

Saguru manages a smile. Words disappear right out of his head.

“I had to make you mine,” said Rhys, “I couldn’t wait any longer. I hoped that we would have better surroundings---” he sighs, glancing around, “---but this suffices.”

‘But this suffices’, the music of his life: _I wished for a better son a stronger leader a bigger heir to my fortune but you suffice I wished for romance but this suffices I wished for -_ nothing is ever good, nothing is every enough, it suffices. He, too, suffices, and it makes him ill to hear Rhys salivate over it like it isn’t ground-belly filthy.

He thinks of Billy, the gaping mess of his throat; he thinks of how scared he must have been on the journey that brought him here, left to wait his fate in canvas sacking worn through with sweat and spit, only to die at the hands of this lunatic, this vibrant, violent, vicious bastard who has decided that he is sufficient enough for his life.

His vision reddens at the corners, and it’s all he can do to hold his fist back from cocking and driving right into Rhys’ stubbornly smiling face.

“To turn me,” he says, and doesn’t quite manage to clip his voice of hostility. “Turn me into---what?”

“The uneducated call us ‘vampires’,” says Rhys. “We are so much more than that.”

He’s wrong. He’s going to lose his temper; he can feel his fingers unfurling, the hasty itching in his fist, and how it balls up so easily; he’s wrong, and he’s going to batter him bloody, for Billy, who died for nothing; for himself, who’s here in this dead-end room listening to this drivel, for everyone else that Rhys has done this too. “I don’t know if you think I’m that stupid,” says Saguru, and every word comes slicing out of his mouth, “or if you genuinely _believe_  that you’ve turned me into some kind of night-prowling monster---”

“We hardly prowl,” says Rhys, affronted.

The fist at his side twitches up, and with effort, he peels it back down. It’s too easy, too quick, too much right now. “Whatever the thing you call it,” says Saguru, “you expect me to believe that you’ve made me one? Do you think I’m going to believe this?”

The night they mated -- he saw too-long teeth, but surely that’s a light’s worth of shadows, an edge to his vision that didn’t work out as it should have. He saw red-rimmed eyes, but that means nothing in war; everyone looks a second away from sobbing. He refuses to believe in ghosts, and he refuses to believe in monsters; human error and human indecency are the reasons for these manifestations. Vampires are another myth, perpetuated by a foolish youth in love with an unstoppable, hexing poet.

Rhys’ warmth leeches from him, and that is the Rhys he saw standing over the body of a German soldier, looking down at him, poking the end of his ruptured cheek with the point of his bayonet for no other reason than to cause injury. “If you don’t believe me,” says Rhys, coldly, “then why are you still here? Some part of you feels it, don’t you?”

Saguru’s response is to turn his back on him. It’s not as snappy as he would have liked; it doesn’t have the same edge to it as a punch, but he can’t look at him any more. He marches to the bedroom door, and wrenches it open so hard that one hinge flies off and smacks him in the cheek, and leaving it half-hanging, Saguru storms out.

Rhys is just behind him, trailing his heels like a puppy. Windows fringed with curtains bristle in a breeze from somewhere, and the nauseatingly bright sunlight gives him about half a second’s pause. _Maybe there’s something_ \--no, there isn’t. He’s sick, and he’s ill, and he’s trapped in a French farmhouse with a lunatic. There is nothing like vampires.

“As soon as I get to a post,” says Saguru, “I’m putting a warrant out for your arrest. You’ll be court-martialled for the murder of Billy. If I have any say on it, you’ll spend the rest of your life rotting behind prison bars.” Every footstep storms in his mind, and the floorboards creak like lovers going at it. “I would run, if I were you. But don’t think I won’t find you.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Rhys snarls.

A vice-tight grip collapses his shoulder into wincing pain, and Rhys swings him around to face one of the windows. “If you don’t believe me, then watch,” Rhys whispers in his ear, and his voice has lost all attempts at civility, and remains steadfastedly bitter. “Watch what happens in sunlight.”

“I hope you burn,” Saguru spits back; feeding delusion to the delusional. He doesn’t have the room to feel guilty for how easily it comes to him, how softly the words insinuate themselves into his tongue. “I hope you burn your fucking---”

Rhys twitches the curtain open just enough to let in a palely glittering sliver of light. It hangs suspended in the air, the edge of it bladed, and Saguru’s words die off on his tongue - there’s something bizarrely compelling about looking at it, but he can hear the thunderous re-echo of his brain going, _run, run, run_ , as if he’s faced with a German machine gun, a cotillerie of armed soldiers when he’s muddy and breathless and far from his trench.

Rhys dips a finger into the sunlight, hisses with pain.

The flesh curdles; turns black immediately, wisps of smoke and fire curling up from where there once a nail, spreading like mustard gas down to the first knuckle. He can smell -- not burning flesh, but something more obscure, obtuse, something sweet and rotten and bursting, ashy and long-dead; it smells like the fire after roasting decrepit rats for supper.

Rhys wrenches his finger away, and clutches it to his chest, and the spreading darkness stops with the reintroduction to shadow.

“Try it,” says Rhys, goading and over sweetened, “try it, and see if you like it.”

It’s too bright to look at, and Saguru can hear his own brain screeching _run_ and whispering to him, _whatever remains however improbable must be the truth, the truth_ , and the truth as Saguru knows it is bitterly twistedly maddeningly broken; he doesn’t want to slip his fingers into the charcoal mess of Rhys’ wake, he doesn’t want to burn. It’s childish, to hover on the precipice of burning, and to know that he won’t do it, because whatever Rhys said--

He reaches out in spite of himself, to spite himself, and feels the first lick of heat from inches away, and even that is too much, too hot, too bright. His fingers want to curl away from it, but he forces himself to put them piano-teacher straight, to let the tip of the tip of one nail edge brightly into the sun and---

Pain explodes in him, so sudden and sharp, it feels like falling teeth, breaking bone, a bullet going through flesh. He wrenches his hand back before he can encapsulate the hurt and put it into words, hides it in the folds of his shirt, and resists the urge to whimper like a child.

Rhys smiles, and tells him, “now, shall we talk like civilized men?”

And dumbly, struck silent, Saguru trails after him towards the corpse of Billy the Yorkshiremen, the black-tipped finger pounding like a split nerve.

 

 

The story as Rhys tells it is dramatically other. There was a young and influential young gentleman, who fell in love with a much older man, the age of which he never knew until the very last gasps of his life. There was a sly and subtle young-looking gentleman, who offered the two of them a promise at immortality - of Keatsian immortality, full of pain and half-longing, of hunger always gnawing at the surface of the mind. For whatever reason - Rhys calls it ‘love’, but it rings false to Saguru, and he’s more likely to trust his instincts than whatever beats inside Rhys’ chest instead of a heart - the young man takes this offer, and wakes up in a tombful of dirt, swallowing spiders, heartbeat still and prone. He rings his finger-tip bell, and is exhumed by a stunned and half-blind groundskeeper.

Rhys tells him the groundskeeper had a virility in him that made his blood sweeter still for the drinking, but kept him bed bound for days after. Saguru imagines a bent-backed old man, the spitting picture of his Scottish uncle, and thinks, _good_. Saguru keeps this image to himself, and the smile half-hidden in a thimble-cap of blood, taken not from Billy, but from Rhys’ own finger.

He hasn’t supped it yet, and if he can avoid doing so, he will.

Blood, says Rhys, expansive and flowing, is the be-all and end-all, the alpha and omega, the snake that eats its own tail. A taste of it whets the appetite, and rouses it more; puts the hunger to bed, and makes it wake even more ferocious. Rats will do until the stomach grows adjusted, or has had a taste of sweeter pastures - and rats are no good for a fledgling, which is why Rhys killed Billy.

The thought that it’s because of his, for his own life, makes Saguru violently sick. He keeps his stomach where it is - there’s scarce but water in it - but the room swims and dips like a carnival carousel, and Rhys’ voice sways in and out of being like a ghost between the worlds.

There are eight clans. Or perhaps ten. Rhys doesn’t know how many the war has burnt out of existence, but there were eight, to begin with - for a start, Cain and Abel, for a second, the Prophetess and the Warlord. He name-drops people as if Saguru understands the drivel he’s speaking - crowned heads of Europe mating with red-eyed commoners; hungry children born of brother and brother, and feasting on the flesh of prison-yard men. Saguru has stopped listening. Saguru watches, instead, a spider suspended on a cobweb above Rhys’ head, spinning silk like Rhys spins stories.

It all boils down, really, to rich and poor and have and have not. It’s a story so old that Saguru doesn’t have a name for it - but he remembers the pattern of it, he remembers his mother playing the same games, pushed through the same holes. Never be too much like one thing, always blend one thing and another. Defy expectations, but meet them. Watch for cracks in the crowd, hatreds, pettiness, hungers for other peoples’ wives and husbands and daughters and sons.

Saguru knows this game. Rhys, for all his posturing, speaks of it so loftily that Saguru knows he doesn’t have a single clue of what he’s speaking of - as if a young heiress would step aside for love, and not send her beloved down to the ship yard as a promoted captain. As if a Captain wouldn’t draw his blade across his first mate’s throat at the instance of speaking out their feelings for each other. There is no such world that patterns itself in poetry, and Rhys should know this, if he is as old as he is.

But he doesn’t.

“Drink,” says Rhys, in a pause. His eyes shine strangely in the hovering light; it’s dim and dark outside, but the twilight speaks of more war. He can hear a plane overhead, and wonders if his new life will end as quickly as his old one, and with the same amount of violence.

Saguru raises the thimble to his mouth. He thinks of Macbeth - the Lady, shrouded in blood, her hands a knot around a knife, whispering to the ears beyond the veil, _come foul spirits, unsex me here._

Rhys whispers, “it’s the only way, my love.”

_Screw your courage to the sticking-place_ , Saguru thinks, a second part of him sneakily whispering, and he throws back the blood. It blooms in him like fire, chasing away pain, hunger; leaving him blank and clean, a new man.

 

 

The war ends as suddenly as it begins, and Saguru is in London for the parades, in Mayfair for the celebration; he hears, the same as English people hear, the announcements of capitulation; he watches the parades from his windows in a lofty London brownhouse, two streets away from his childhood home (wondering if this was where Rhys saw him first, if he marked him out when he was a child). He’s there for when Craiglockhart empties of patients, and the men go home; he’s there for his own funeral.

It’s strange, to be dead and not dead. The stalls are filled with people that crop up in his memory, hazy-dark as twilight: there’s a man he thinks sold him sweets when he was younger, there’s half of his broken unit from Scotland, there’s the Highland regiment that trained with his uncle, there out of respect. His mother sits in an aisle all her own, dressed in wedding red, a bloodstain cut into the wound. From the distance he is, he can’t tell what her face is doing, but he doubts she mourns him as a son.

As an entry into the world of British noblesse, he cannot imagine her pain. As a son, he was never what she wanted, always too loud and too much, too thoughtful, never performative enough for her liking, never playing well enough with the neighbour’s children, never pretty enough to compete with round-cheeked British boys and girls.

Her face is composed and still, tear-tracks one either of her cheeks, but not moving her lacquered makeup. She looks beautiful; heads turn when he stands up and goes to his coffin (and who, Saguru wonders, did Rhys butcher to make him look like him, or was he lost in the fields of myriad warfare, or returned in matchbox pieces? What happened in those days where they travelled from France, and Rhys would hole himself up to write his letters like a man possessed?) and lays her hand, and the lily in it, on top of the shiny wood. He wonders if it was her idea to go with a tiger lily, blazing like a sunset; he wonders if it was her idea to eschew formal black for lucky red.

For a moment, their eyes meet, and Saguru shrinks away from the sight of her, certain that she’s seen him.

She nods instead, formal and blindly, and takes her place in the front. For that split second, her eyes shine, and fresh tears track through her makeup, and Saguru feels his heart splitting in his chest. He wants to be a young boy again, and hide in her skirts, to take her hand and tell her that he’s not dead, not really, not in the sense of the word.

But he remembers her, ramrod straight, refusing British fashion, pinching his cheek and telling him to be better than the soldiers expected, to take the world and make it his, and in the same breath, telling him to form himself in the image of his father, quiet and demure, folding himself into other peoples’ expectations like a paper doll.

His father isn’t there. Business goes on in London.

It’s the soldiers weeping at the front that hurts him the most to see. His mother is sad, but beautifully sad; the men that sob at the front look hard-bodied and able, German-tried-and-tested. There are bigger nightmares in their heads than a dead captain, but they cry like they’ve peered into the abyss and it has peered back.

Rhys grips his shoulder hard so he doesn’t slip from where he is and go to comfort him. He feels a bone crack and repair itself, a breath of blinding pain that is just as quickly gone, and wants to push his elbow back into his throat and---

And what?

It’s not time for fighting yet. There is no point in bombarding when the enemy is aware that you are there; it is the quiet that lulls them into peace, and it is then that you should attack. Rhys is too aware of his mind, too aware of the way that he is. He needs to convince him, before he attacks, that he has submitted, that this life is what he wants.

But it’s difficult, to see pain happening, and not be able to reach it, solve it; it’s difficult to see his uncle standing there, staring at the coffin as if he’s not sure where he is, the white-knuckled grip on his cane enough to snap it in half, and not speak to him. When he sees Jack, drunk and swaying, suspended up in the air only by the arm on his elbow, looking so defeated, it’s nearly too much for him to take.

The funeral ends quietly, the way the war ended, and Saguru returns to the brownhouse feeling ripped open on the inside.

Rhys asks him to bed, and he goes with him; he sits there, and lets him fill himself on his body, lets him crawl over him and kiss him, and believe that he loves him; like this, it’s easy to let his mind melt away and focus on his freedom, that glittering nugget of awareness that reminds him that none of this was his choice; that Rhys’ careful affection only hides his true nature, a monster and a beast. The hunger inside him, never sated even with the punch-clock bitemarks on Rhys’ throat, is another reminder that he was never like this, that there is something in him, now, that wants more than he can give.

But he is patient, he is clever, and he kisses Rhys goodnight when he rolls off of him sated, and he plans his revenge like a society woman plans dinner seatings.

First, he needs to understand how many of --- them are there, how many people like Rhys have turned other people. He needs to understand his limitations, because Rhys hoards information away like it’s money, and there has to be a reason for it. It’s the letters sent to him at the front by the General, telling him one story, giving him another for the men, yet another for the hollow-eyed supports, yet another for the families of the dead. He doesn’t have the foggiest idea of where to start looking.

He doesn’t feel like his own self.

Rhys snores at his side, and Saguru rolls over to look at him, considers lifting the pillow behind his head and pressing it down over his face. It takes much less pressure to kill a man than people know. A pillow is adequately soft, but does he even need to breathe?

As if his thoughts scream, Rhys’ eyes wink open, and they’re candle-bright in the dark, watchful as a starving fox near a hen-coop.

Saguru sates him with kisses. They taste of old blood and bitten lips, and Rhys lulls himself back to sleep, but it’s too risky to observe him yet. He rolls onto his back, and stares at the ceiling, trying to ignore the rumbling of hunger in his stomach.

When he was little, and his mother would send him to his room without food for a slight against the neighbour’s children, or for being far too silent at dinner, he would lay in bed and try to sleep, and all the thoughts that chased him were food: globs of fattened meat on a bed of heat-fluffed rice, dripping with oil and sauces, the zing of spice on his tongue nibbling at every mouthful afterwards, thick scones spread heavy with clotted cream and a bloody smear of jam, peaches like fists poached in their own sugary sweetness and served hollowed out and de-pitted, stuffed with cream and brown sugar.

In the war, food would chase him too, anything to take the taste of pan-fried rat and crumbled biscuits from his mouth, and he would think of all the dishes he could eat when the war was over and he was home; he’d give his hand for an apple sweetly ripe, for meat that didn’t taste of iron. He’s home now, and the war is over, and there’s hunger inside him so deep that it feels like a snapped bone, and all Saguru can think of is the red, red, red pool around Billy’s throat, and the iron sweetness of it on his tongue.

His stomach gurgles, and Saguru rolls onto his side and punches the pillow into submission. Rhys snores next to him, too perfect to be real, and he closes his eyes.

He slips into dreams blood-red with hunger.

 

 

It is two months before the chance to see other people like him arises.

Rhys comes home at two in the morning, a handful of hours after waking. It is not Saguru’s business to know where he goes in dead-asleep London, and so he does not ask, but the slamming of the door startles him from his book, and he’s looking up at the door when Rhys swaggers in. He has the slick-bone glossiness of just having fed, a few less hunger wrinkles around his eyes and his mouth, the walk of a hunting panther. He throws himself into a chair close to the fire, and groans his pleasure, tilting his head back against the hard knob of the splat.

Saguru returns to his book. In two months, he’s learned that Rhys answers no questions he wants to answer, and to talk to him is pointless. He reads, instead, anything he can get his hands on, until Rhys tires of the silence and speaks to him.

Doyle’s words blur in front of his eyes. He tries to listen for a hint of what is happening on the other side of the room, but he is thwarted. The fire cracks, the floorboard squeaks, the downstairs lady attacks her door with a dustpan and brush, and the night beyond the window rolls on with the same chaotic noise of London town in the morning, only muted. Someone is singing, someone is breaking glass, and Saguru feels trapped behind glass, a butterfly pinned to a cork board and doomed only to watch the same room.

He thinks he might go mad if something doesn’t happen soon.

“We’ve been invited to a party,” says Rhys, and his words float out of his mouth like opium pipe smoke.

When Saguru looks at him, his black eyes seem too black, his lips too thin. His smile too full of teeth. It’s nothing to worry about, he is sure, but something in his hindbrain urges him to run.

And look where he is because he didn’t listen the first time.

“Have we?” says Saguru, his voice as blank as he can make it. He turns a page without having read the previous seconds, crack-snap of the spine and the leather binding as he shifts in his chair. The fire spits embers from a thick log, settles and splits in the flame. “By who?”

Rhys chews his words over carefully, and in the seconds that pass, Saguru hears the lady downstairs move on from the dustpan to the polishing cloth, the lad outside switch from songs to bawdy limerick, a motorcar trundle down the road. His fingers feel the pages beneath him, folding and unfolding the flap at the top, uninterested in Sherlock again - Rhys is taking so long to answer that he wonders if this is it, if he might finally learn something worth knowing, something to help him.

“Some friends,” says Rhys, slowly, “who have heard that you are --- newly initiated. They want to celebrate with you.”

There’s little he can think of less comforting, less flattering, less like something he wants to do.

But when he says ‘friends’---

Saguru bites his lip. He lets him see it, that half-second glint of fear, and then sets the book aside, turns his head. “What friends?” he asks, looking out of the window at a skyline rippling and full with unfamiliar stars.

“Friends,” says Rhys again; the wolf with scars is not so naive as to allow himself to get trapped twice. “Colleagues. Brothers of the spirit.”

It is likely that Saguru hasn’t noticed before now, but Rhys’ words are syrupy with affected grace, and they rake at his ears like fingernails on metal. How he didn’t notice before is beyond him, but now that he has, his mind aches with the urge to tear down his poetry, stomp it into shape as new and better words.

Saguru smiles, instead, brittle as glass, though it matters not. When he turns back to his book, the words blur unseen, and he has no mind for Doyle’s languid writing. Very well, then, if Rhys refuses to tell him, there is nothing more to do about it except to wait, to prey on any lonely hints like a beast, and store them up until it would be best to use them.

If Jack were here, he’d laugh, and tell him his brain would be the death of him.

The wave of loneliness that hits him at that blurs the words again, with damp and misery. He closes the book, and goes to bed, and when Rhys enters in the night and leaves the smarting bites on his neck, Saguru lets his pain vent in kind.

He’s not yet used to the taste of blood, but it has stopped making him ill, and that worries him more than anything else.

On the morning-eve of the sixteenth, Rhys wakes him at twilight to get ready. The bath is filled brimful with water and flowers, and he pushes him into it in a flurry of words and hand-gestures, dunking him down into soap and steam like he’s fresh from the trenches, and still spattered with mud. Saguru washes on automatic, not hissing when Rhys plunges more water on top of him, cold at the driving ice, and barks at him to hurry up.

In a matter of minutes, he’s bathed, but it’s time for another plunging, and he lives through it with stoic, Scottish grimness, folding his fingers together like cards, waiting for him to ready with his fussing. Saguru climbs out of the bath, long limbs gleaming wet, and takes the towel that’s draped over the counter-top, wrapping it around his waist as a futile measure against the spotting water.

The floor dampens beneath him as he walks to the bedroom, and finds his clothes already set out on the bed. The suit is ludicrous, scarlet as a throat wound, the shirt obnoxiously ruffled. He isn’t sure he even owns anything that ruffled, or cufflinks in that shade of ruby-brightness; he isn’t sure anything on that bed is his, or if it will fit.

“I’ve had it tailored,” says Rhys, from somewhere down the hallway, “hurry up, and put it on.”

Indignities aplenty, then, Saguru thinks, and shrugs on the ruffled shirt first, to get the worst of it over. The ruffles stick out from underneath his chin like feathers, and he dismays at the idea of looking like a startled hen, but excitement creeps in underneath the horror: tonight’s the night. He’ll meet Rhys’ friends then, and understand what it is that made Rhys do what he did. He’ll understand another block of the puzzle; he’ll understand more of what Rhys is.

The suit, unsurprisingly, fits. He’s not sure he enjoys the prospect of it, and twists in front of the mirror, watching the play of fabric over the thin muscles in his back. He’s lost weight and muscle-tone. Everything about him appears bony and starved, elegantly minimalist.

Saguru leaves the thought alone, and answers to Rhys’ sharp call with a, ‘I’m done!’. It’s hard to force cheer into his voice, but worth it for the small kiss he gets to the cheek, the unspoken assurance that Rhys assumes nothing.

Rhys takes him by the arm on their way out, and Saguru lets him. His eyes wander back up to the stars, unfeeling in their darkness, watchful as sentries, and he promises there will come a day where he sits and looks at them, and he will be free.

 

 

The party begins with a sacrifice; a little donation of blood. Rhys pricks his finger on a looming needle, and spatters it on the small scrap of paper that is passed through the gap in the door.

Saguru bites his lip, and kisses the sheet, and leaves the bloodied lipmark like a calling card. They’re admitted in silence, given masks to put on their faces, though the masks are paper-thin, bedecked with gilted lace, and hide nothing. Saguru’s scratches at the corners of his eyes, the high tops of his cheekbones, and he has to tuck his hands into his pockets to refuse the itching that’s travelling down over his cheeks.

In silence, he walks behind Rhys, following the sway and dip of his walk. They go down a staircase and turn right at a cross, and spill out into a room that’s lit solely by candlefire and a chandelier so opulently draped in jewels, it hurts to look at it. Millions of him refract in diamond sight, and Saguru drops his gaze so he doesn’t look at the numerous pairs of his eyes, looking back at him.

He looks, instead, at the shadowy crowding. People huddle together like families, heads bent, their faces butchered by their masks. He sees too many pairs of poking teeth, too many red-brimmed eyes; he sees too many hands with claw-tip nails curled into the palms.

A few glance his way, notice Rhys. There are curls of the lips, whispers behind hands.

Rhys’ vise grip tightens on his waist, and he’s steered towards an older gentleman, broad-shouldered in a Huntsman suit, one eye covered with an elegant blotted darkness on his mask. People are apart from him, looking at him askance as though he’s a tilted mirror, and to look at him directly would send their head into a nauseous tail-spin.

Saguru wonders. Rhys has spoken so infrequently of his life apart, has never mentioned anything like family or friends, or acquaintances, even, and it’s odd to see a man without any sort of ties, it’s odd to see the way that people skirt around him like he’s contagious; it doens’t remind him anything of the army, where everyone was too much and toppled over one another, it reminds him of quarantine tents in the dark, the sound of poisonous coughing, and pain.

Rhys holds onto his waist like he’s about to break into a run. Saguru lets him, tilts into him, tries to absorb everything he can while looking straight head; glinting glasses filled with opaque red liquid on the table, no plates or platters, flowers wilting underneath a hundred-bulbed chandelier, the frescoes on the ceiling and the walls turned overt and obscene with the careful application of shadows, hungry sparkling mouths painted red or curved in smiles. Every step, it’s advertised, needs to go slowly; every step needs a minute of consideration.

Saguru shudders, and looks askance, tries not to let his thoughts dwindle to fear; but there’s fear in his belly at every bright mouth, every pair of eyes that glide their way, every word that’s just blurred enough by atmosphere he can’t hear it. His worst habit has always been to know, the knowing of things, to want to know, and being here, in the middle of all these questions, is making him dizzy and irritated. It creeps along his skin, his lack of knowledge, becomes entwined in his fingertips.

Rhys’ palm is sweaty on the small of his back, and Saguru wants to tell him that he didn’t know he could do that, even.

He doesn’t, because he knows it will lead to a look and then, later, to a bruise blossoming on his ribs that will take weeks to heal.

“Why is everyone looking at you?” asks Saguru, to split the silence of his own screaming mind. Rhys accepts a glass of something from a roving waiter, and Saguru can see the tight-fist tension in his eyes, in the way he calculates whether or not he could, or should, swallow it in one go.

A small, small, small part of him is satisfied that Rhys is so scared, that he has nothing more to do with his pretty words and his pretty gestures. A part of him is thrilled that Rhys can’t do anything more but stand there and drink.

“It’s because I have the most beautiful man in the room,” says Rhys, with some of his old charm, but it’s badly bent underneath the weight of stress. His eyes keep searching the room, looking for someone, and discarding the people he sees; he appears not to be paying attention to the whispers behind his hands, but to the gaps in conversations and the gaps between bodies, like a starving man searching for a coin in the fountain. “Everyone’s jealous.”

“No-one’s even looking at me,” says Saguru, quiet, and he sees Rhys recoil from the truth with lies on his lips.

It never gets as far as actualization, because one of the tall, elegant figures in the black suit peels away from the rest of the madding crowd and approaches. He’s ridiculously attractive, even if Saguru knows better to believe that that is all his benefits: dark hair scraped away from a narrow face, cheekbones like the edge of a knife, a smile that comes quick and mischievous. His nose looks off-set, broken at least twice, and his hands, around the delicate stem of the wine glass, look massive.

There’s a crushing weight that accompanies him, sharply distant from the stiffness of everyone else. Something in the way he looks reminds Saguru of guns; there’s that same flat calculation, that same unemotion.

Rhys looks like he’s about to pass out, and Saguru can’t even blame him, might even feel sorry for him if it wasn’t his own fault.

“Graves,” says Rhys, and bows his head, legitimately lowers his head like he’s prostrating himself before a king.

Graves acknowledges him with a tilt of his own, barely a nod, and then looks at him. It’s not -- that crushing weight that follows him doesn’t seem bad, and Saguru tries to distance it from all other emotions, from everything else that he knows. He’s trying to understand what it is about him; is it the fingers, long and pale, the large palms, the way his mouth curls up into a smile that has a hundred years of secrets behind it? Is it how he tilts his head in careful acknowledgment of them both, but it feels like he sees through them?

There’s something, and Saguru doesn’t know what it is, and he wants to chew through his own brain to try and find the answers to something, something.

“Saguru Hakuba,” says Saguru, because Rhys has been struck dumb by his presence. He tilts his head, no more. “A pleasure to meet you.”

Graves has a sweet, musical voice. “And to you,” he says, and smiles at him with a trace of genuine warmth.

It sinks so deeply into him that Saguru is afraid his knees will give out, and he didn’t know, before now, how much colder Rhys was than anyone else; how much he’s missed softness, how much he’s missed people being affectionate with him. He wants to thank him just for smiling at him, for looking at him like he’s worth something.

Rhys’ sidelong glare tells him not to dare it, and Saguru puts it aside, and leans back to watch the rest of the interaction play out.

Graves has a bat pinned to his lapel, which amuses him hugely. He catches Graves’ eye and gets a wink in return, and Saguru feels himself flushing like a schoolchild, so ridiculous on several levels. Rhys doesn’t notice, too busy trying to delve deeper into the conversation, to keep Graves there a minute longer.

Except Saguru can’t understand it.

The words - so much of them seem familiar, but they’re peppered with names and places and names of places that Saguru doesn’t recognize, and every new mention chips away at him. He wants to know what ‘Tremere’ means; what the Club Escapade is; he wants to understant why Rhys says the word ‘brujah’ with a curl of his lip so high it looks like a snarl; he wants to know why Graves’ eyes flatten and flatten until it feels like he’s looking into a mirror, and seeing himself. Rhys doesn’t notice, too busy with his gesturing and his wild, wild speech, but Saguru can see Graves cooling, and it frightens him deep somewhere in his hindbrain where the animal impulses of man live.

He wants to know what else is happening that he does not understand.

Graves catches his eye again, and they flicker, they warm. He looks much different to what Saguru expects of a vampire; the bat-pin at his lapel is only the beginning, because he’s wearing clothing that’s gone out of style twenty centuries ago. A shirt soft with ruffles turns his chest bulky, even though there’s so little of him; his trousers are stovepipe and thin, and his shoes shine like they’ve been dipped in ink. When he holds the glass, Saguru can see rings winking on his fingers, but they look cheap, like they were bought on a whim or given as gifts, and well-worn. He can tell from the way Graves tilts his head that he’s unspeakably bored by the conversation, and that boredom for him is worse than incapacitation, but he doesn’t leave.

He looks at him, instead, and Saguru has to look away. There’s something too soft in his eyes, and he’s terrified looking at it too much will break him where everything else hasn’t.

He misses, suddenly, the company of his men, the company of his soldiers. He wants to sit down outside in the heat and the moonless dark, and tell stories of better days, and listen to them butchering his accent, and talk about Japan like it’s a place to attain instead of a myth half of them believe he’s making up; he wants to visit his mother on Sunday and suffer through her attempts at the cooking, and to sit by the pond in the garden and watch the fat Japanese koi play hide and seek from the frog. There’s a lifetime of summers he’s missed when he was studying, holed up in his room and buried underneath the weight of iambic pentameter, and maths, and history, and science, and Saguru wants it back, wants it all back with such an acute, throbbing pain that it almost brings tears to his eyes.

Graves, if he sees it, says nothing. Saguru wonders if he cares, if it means something to him. Wonders, then, if it would change anything if Graves did know.

He doesn’t dare talk.

A figure cuts through the crowd, parting people like a whale through a shoal. He’s much taller than Graves, which seems an impossibility, but this man clears him by a head and a half at least. He has shoulders that bulge underneath the austere cut of his suit, hands that look like they’ve spent too much time as fists, and long hair that Saguru would picture on a more waifish boy, not on someone that looks like he’s run the circuit of underground boxing twice, and beaten every contender. His nose is slightly skew, indicating it’s set wrong; his mouth is cruel and honed into his face with edges. There’s a scar running across his upper lip, and it gives him a permanent curl, a smirk that makes him look threatening.

He comes up behind Graves, and takes the wine-glass from his hand, drinking deep.

Rhys pauses, unsure of how to continue, and what to say.

“Landry,” scolds Graves, and his voice warms like sunlight. “You pest.”

Landry lowers the glass just enough to smile at him, and the smile sneaks its way between Saguru’s ribs. It’s just so -- soft, and caring, so delicate in love, and Saguru wants, badly, to have someone smile at him like that, and he knows it will never happen. Rhys has him now; if there’s another man, it won’t be in the recent future, and --- even if so, that sort of love seems precious, rare, the kind of love that doesn’t make it in every lifetime.

The kind of life that only a select few people get to experience, and Saguru has never been lucky in these things.

He holds his jealousy close, lets it warm him.

“I missed you,” says Landry, and hands him the wine-glass, now half drunk, and he leans in and gives him a kiss to the forehead as though Graves doesn’t exude a sense of distance. It softens them both, seeing them against each other, and Saguru would be very happy to stay there and watch them interact, lose himself in the gentle love that they show one another.

A glance at Rhys says that not only is this risky, it’s unattainable. Rhys looks like he’s burning with questions, with words, all of them directed at Graves, and he’s watching Landry like he’s something unpleasant that someone has tracked into the room. “Landry,” says Rhys, with a short, toy-like bob of his head.

Landry doesn’t acknowledge him with anything more than a flickering gaze, and then he’s looking at him, instead. He has beautiful eyes, gold like candlefire, and Saguru ends up half-transfixed by how bright they are, how they bring out the pallor of his skin so much more beautifully than Rhys’ ditchwater-blue.

“I don’t believe we met,” says Landry, with a definite gentleness to his words. He holds out one huge paw of a hand, and says, “I’m Landry. Graves’---” he pauses, seems to struggle to choose a word, and settles on, “---lover. Partner.”

“And everything in between,” says Graves, smiling, and the warmth from him is staggering. “Soulmate. Friend. Family.” His smile widens, and this is deliberate, the way he askances his glance to take in Rhys, how he almost curves his words so that the meaning of them seems to rubs against Rhys’ face. “He was Turned in a most unfortunate accident.”

It takes him a couple of minutes to realize that Graves is addressing him personally; he’s too busy watching the play of artificial light on Landry’s skin and thinking of France again, France where all the skin he saw was bleached pale with malnutrition and death-close pallor, and he’s thinking of bright-eyed boys turned to corpses in a blink, and of Rhys, and how was it possible that he never noticed between all of his men that Rhys was the only one who wore health like it was fashionably outdated? And then Graves clears his throat, and his memory hurtles back through the hours and to the present, and Saguru blinks, and the room swarms with light and attacks his head, and he’s left fumbling for a response in the wake of Graves’ saying.

But it’s difficult; he doesn’t know what ‘turned’ means, can only think of social contexts - ‘turned’, as in, developed an interest in one political party over the other; developed an interest in one gender over the other; implications of predatory aspects in normal day-to-day interactions. He opens his mouth, and falters, and in that distance between his words, Graves’ eyes flash so cool, it’s like he’s a different man. At him?

Rhys, besides him, gripping his arm and squeezing it tight enough to bruise.

“Turned?” says Saguru, and it’s dual-pronged; he says it because he wants to know; he says it because Rhys patently does not want him to know, doesn’t want him to speak.

“Is it unfamiliar to you?” says Graves, but he knows it is, and now the full blue-scorch pull of his gaze is on Rhys and Saguru feels almost sorry for him, “this is the boy you chose, is it not?” Not even a name to end his sentence; it gives the impression that Graves is one of those people who uses names like a weapon, and if he has ceased to use yours, then what are you in his eyes? _Nothing dust an insect_.

Rhys draws the same conclusions, squirms visibly. “We, ah---we haven’t had---much of a chance to explain the inner workings of the Masquerade,” says Rhys.

“In months?” There’s a single cutting implication in those words and Rhys fails to notice it.

Instead, he puffs out his chest like a bird, answers with indignity and fire, “it’s not like I’ve let him out of my sight! I’ve explained the basics!”

Graves’ mouth thins; he turns to him, cocks his head towards Rhys in a manner that speaks volumes. Rhys’ nails dig into him, and Saguru’s reminded of the scratch marks he left on his back, how they sting still, when it’s cold.

Rhys wilts, and to his right, Saguru finds that Graves’ --- paramour has come up next to him, so close that he can smell a scent that has to be him (floral, somehow, but not; like smoke belching out of a deep wood, fresh-pack snow, ice just shattered on wet, rainy ground) and Saguru turns to look at him and meets his lampfire eyes, and considers that something in the world is subtly changing again, subtly undoing itself.

“Would you like a drink?” says Landry, and he extends his arm.

Saguru doesn’t think that there’s an option to say ‘no’, but he waits a beat or two to watch Graves extend a long-fingered hand, take hold of Rhys’ upper arm like he’s a rowdy boy caught stealing biscuits from a tin just before his dinner, and makes off with him into some dark and damp corner where the swirling ballgown dresses and the two-jump foxtrot music doesn’t stray.

Landry takes him off sharpishly in the other direction, and Saguru doesn’t see Rhys again for the whole night, but he sees a great deal more.

Landry insists on taking him around and introducing him to what he names ‘clan heads’, each of them with a room to themselves, comingling with others of their ilk only when explicitly forced to. When Landry approaches, the standoffishness melts, only to return again like a barrier as soon as they turn their back; from this, Saguru infers that they’re a form of royalty, some twisted-around semblance of lords and ladies for whatever Rhys made him. Landry explains as much, when he returns to him with two champagne flutes filled with something bright and sparkling, and hands it to him with the unforeseen circumstance of expecting him to drink it.

Saguru noses the smell, decides it’s not unpleasant. The first sip sinks into his stomach, and the second makes his head spin, but it fills a hollow, cold place that hasn’t been filled since the first night of --- since Bill, and when he thinks of Bill, his vision hazes over too, and he has to turn his head away so suddenly that he nearly spills the liquid over himself.

Landry notices; Landry doesn’t ask. There’s dancing to be done, and he’s pulled out onto an unsteady ballroom floor, to dance with this man three times as tall as he is, shining golden in a nest full of ghost-pale vipers, blood-spotted moths, a single razor-winged butterfly in a garden. The presence of him seems to disrupt; Saguru notices eyes sliding over to them, hands cover mouths as they whisper, but no-one speaks to them directly.

It becomes easy to ignore them. It becomes easier to forget that it has been a half hour and he has not seen Rhys and he has not seen Graves, and that something is very, very wrong.

The wine or champagne or whatever liquor was in that glass sings through him, and he takes another mouthful of it, downs it straight down when they’re back at the table. Landry watches him, and then pulls him away from the table to one of the balconies spilling over with plants, and night in London is very dark and very still, but here, it shines so bright that the stars have ceased to exist. Down below, on the Versaillesesque lawns, couples do as couples do, and up above, the silken canopy twinkles with some magic that Saguru has never seen before. The air whispers, shaking the climbing roses, unearthing petals all over his head; Saguru gathers up a palmful, breathes them in, lets them flutter.

“What am I?” he asks Landry, who is standing close to him, looking out at the gardens with something like fondness. “What are you?”

“The easiest way of putting it is ‘dead’,” says Landry.

_Why, you’re dead._ Rhy with his blue blue blue eyes watching him.

Hearing it a second time is not quite as startling as Saguru expects, and there’s a saying, isn’t there? If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck -- he supposes if two people tell him that he’s dead, and he witnessed his own funeral, it isn’t good manners to go on believing that it’s some elaborate farce, and the thought of that makes him want to laugh, hysterically, or cry, or both.

“I see,” says Saguru, and he wishes he had more of the whiskey; he wishes he was one half of the couple down there, laughing together; or a floating rose petal on the breeze; or anything, anything, but himself. “Well, that’s highly inconvenient.”

Landry nods, which is ludicrous in and of itself. “It is,” he says, and there’s something warmer in his voice than proper British; he doesn’t sound like he was born anywhere here,and that and the moonlight-black-blue of his skin makes it easy to believe that he’s from --- somewhere else, somewhere warmer, somewhere other. “But it becomes easier to deal with it, once you know how.”

“And pray tell,” says Saguru, and hysteria can’t stop his voice from curling over in a perfect imitation of his upbringing, “how do I learn how? Do I shadow older corpses? Will I be taught by the shambling mound of Merlin, or perhaps the earth-stuck spirit of King Arthur?”

“Oh, no,” says Landry, “you don’t want either of them to teach you. Merlin’s good folk, but he’s crazy. Haven’t seen King Arthur recently, either. Ran off with a dryad, I heard.”

Now he does laugh and his laugh borders on whipped-mad, and he remembers when he was little, reading about the punishments his ancestors heaped on their criminals - left isolated, constantly silently watched, left to dwindle down to sinew and then to bones, to become a smeared memory on the floor of a dirty cell somewhere somewhere - and he thinks he understands now what that’s like, the power of that control. Everyone here watches, but it’s only Landry’s attention who seems to address him, and his half-answers are still answers.

Saguru swallows down the rest of the panic, snatches a glass off the tray of a dog-roving waiter, practically inhales it. “Right,” he says, “of course.”

Beneath them, he feels the shift of the party, a palpable swaying that’s almost like heat: there are couples between the rose-bushes, and he can see from this distance someone’s bare ankle, an abandoned shirt that’s heavy with striping, he can see kisses; at his back, he feels eyes, he hears questions, and Saguru has no answers for them.

He’s never been on this side of the conversation before, can never remember having more questions than answers. For a second, he pities his mother; wonders if this is what it felt like to be her, surrounded by him, left to raise him because her husband was off forming the new police force that would take England by storm and restore her to the glory that the war to end all wars bled out in shell-holes.

“I’m dead,” he says, and it sounds ludicrous. “Dead as a butchered cow.”

“Dead,” says Landry, agreeably taking his discarded wineglass before it tips over the thin railing and smashes open on the head of some passing pretty little thing, “dead as dead can be, my dear boy.”

His stomach bounces, and Saguru has to keep himself from trembling.

Dead dead dead dead revolves in his head, and it brings up the battlefield he left behind when he was a half-man, not brave enough to lead his men to massacre, always delayed by thinking that he wasn’t strong enough to write another letter to another mother to tell her that another of her sons had capped it. The air around him thins, and Saguru hangs his head over the railing, and tries to gulp in breath, and fails.

Dead. Dead dead dead. He’s dead and he’s still here and his men somewhere are nothing but worm and rot now, nothing but mud-splattered sinking bones, yellowing sloughing flesh, wandering the woods until they laid down and died, and it’s so unfair. Most of them better men than he, but he’s here, and they’re not, and Saguru’s vision blurs.

His hands form a fist around the railing, and he grips it as tightly as he can. The night’s bitterly cold, and the metal’s like a knife, and when his bare skin touches it, he can almost hear the sound of gluing up to metal.

“It’s---I’m---”

Landry watches him, and he sees him out of the corner of his eye, how his face softens with so much warmth, how he glances to the open, golden door, and then rests a hand on his back. Even through his shirt, Landry’s fingertips are pock-marked and surfaced with scars, and it feels like getting his back scratched by a shark, but it drags him back from his nausea and to here, to now.

His men are dead and dying, and somehow he’s achieved it before them, and somehow he’s not dead the way they are dead. More questions crest, and Saguru clings to him, dragging them all inside him better than the air he tried to sip: what is he? What happened? Does he eat or drink? What is the Masquerade? What are the Lords? Below them, a woman tilts her  head back on a bench, and he sees, not hears, the snap of cold teeth, and there’s a gush of red down her throat, but it doesn’t seem cruel. Her arms band around her lover, and her moan drifts on the wind.

Saguru turns his head away, catches Landry’s golden eyes, and it’s easier to look at him when his mouth isn’t full with rottenness.

“Will you explain things to me?” he asks, and it comes out more pitiful, sadder, than he feels the question should be; it comes out begging, it comes out hungered. “I just --- I want to know everything. I want to know what I am. Rhys didn’t explain anything to me, didn’t really let me out of the house--” like a torrent, all his words are spilling from him, too quick to keep note of, and he tells him about that night, the rasp of Rhys’ teeth, the man he killed on the floor, and how Saguru pressed his mouth to his throat and drank up the last instances of his heart, drank up his life.

His legs wobble only once when he’s telling it, and he’s pleased, and he’s disgusted, and he doesn’t want to think about it anymore because it’s all too new and raw.

Landry, though, Landry understands, Landry nods, Landry tells him he’ll explain.

“Let me show you the Masquerade first,” he tells him, and offers him his elegantly-clad arm, muscle bulging.

There’s a single startling second where Saguru thinks again of Rhys, and how he drifted in Graves’ wake, and he worries about him - he worries about him even knowing what he did and what he did to him and what he is now, and will that be a weakness of his that he cannot get over, will that be what drives the final nail into his little coffin? From what he sees below in the gardens kindness is special, it basks, it breathes; has he already started to become a monster that will sneak into the shadows at night, prey on the unsuspecting wanderer, do to them what Rhys did---

His stomach is empty, but he’s overful on air, and Landry has to hold his hair back as he dribbles watery champagne over the railing. Below the music doesn’t stop; the golden door blinds and warps, and when he lifts his hand to wipe it over his face, it’s wet with tears he can’t feel.

Inside, the ballroom has quietened a little, and the music playing has moved from elegant two-step fox-trots to something simmering and low and more in the style of ballet. He can see movement in the corners of his eyes, shadow-pale, elegant people drifting together (most of them know each other most of them don’t look at him but there are a few eyes flitting to the corners where people perch and hold their fluted glasses and watch the ballroom with a hunger like a general looking at a battlefield and the miles to go before his soldiers sleep and part of him wants to march up to them and ask them what they are part of him sneaky and quieter and small wants to sit there bask in it breathe it in and make his decisions slowly when he knows more).

Landry sweeps him around and the eyes follow. He tastes the air, bitter, perfume over a tang of dirt.

Graves is still not back.

_Don’t worry_ , that voice again the depth of his conscience or something angrier something that the Germans put there when they gunned down his men, that voice that Saguru tries not to notice, that sounds so much like his mother’s and like his and he tilts his head up to look at Landry and tries to listen to the individual jigsaw-puzzle parts of the music and how they blend together, but it’s hard to keep track when Landry’s eyes are so clear and there’s so much else going on.

Landry explains about the Masquerade during a waltz. “It’s the way of life,” he says, “the rules we all follow to make sure that humans don’t see us, don’t know we’re there.” Rules sounds officious, like there’s a governing body, but Landry doesn’t say more until he dips him over his arm, and his words husk at his throat, “don’t kill. Don’t talk about it. Obey the rules of your clan.”

That’s it? Saguru thinks, and he can feel the laughter building again, _dead dead dead._ Landry tugs him up before he can stop him, tilts him back down again, there’s a pause a pause a pause, and he tells him the clans one by one, while he dances with him around a ballroom that suddenly seems too quiet: the tzminsce, half monsters, pulled away from the lure by the science of discovery, birthed from fallen stars; the tremere, in love with the beauty and the elegance, the second-most cruel, the least likely to show mercy; the malkavian, witch-born, Seer-souled, the source of the giggling he can hear in the background; Brujah, witches and spirit-hunters and clairvoyants with battle-trumpets sounding in their heads, and there are others and there are others, and Saguru can’t remember them all; but he remembers Landry’s mouth moving, the pressure of his hand at his back, the buzz of gossip overlaid with music and words he only half-understands, snatched around his head like swatting flies (turned---kill him--the prince wouldn’t---blood on his hands---).

It’s too much it’s too much it’s too much and he draws away from Landry when the music is still vibrating hot and high on a long long long violin note, pulls away with the excuse that he needs to drink, and goes to the stretched-out white table and its tiny mountains of glasses, selects one at random, and swallows down wine that’s papery on his throat, cuts and stings. He watches Landry watch him, waits until the crowd drifts in front of them, two tall men escorting a woman wearing a lacy green dress cut to the soft place behind her knees, and then he turns and nips behind the table, pushes open the hefty door with his shoulder, slips inside and lets it drift shut behind him.

He knows Graves went down this way and he knows Graves will be here somewhere and the longer that Rhys is away the more he’s wondering what’s happening, what talk is taking so long, and the cynical soft mothering voice in his ears whispers that this is it and Rhys is dead and he’ll be even more alone than he is but then he sees him at the end of the hallway, not dead, not dead, staring blankly at the wall.

Relief buckles his knees, and he darts to him, abandoning the glass on the sideboard, reaching out to take hold of his arm, and pull him around, but something is wrong, his face is too slack, his eyes don’t focus on him, and when Rhys does look at him, it’s without recognition.

“Who are you?” he asks, looks down at his fingers on their arm.

Saguru lets go like it’s come detached in his grip, and retches, feels the champagne burn in the back of his throat, and his stomach’s been emptied over the balcony but the sight of those blank blue eyes make his gorge rise again; ‘whoareyouwhoareyouwhoareyou’ echoes like screaming in a trench, and he takes a step back before he makes himself stop, makes himself steel.

“Saguru,” he says, and again, “Saguru, your---” what are they to each other now but enemies, not in so many words, not in so many breaths, “---your---”

But Rhys’ shows no recollection that he’s known him, and when he takes a step away from him, Saguru lets him go, thinks of how he must seem, thinks of how he is obviously and warily unknown, “I think you have the wrong person,” says Rhys, and shunts him aside with his shoulder.

He can hear footsteps further down the hallway, Rhys’ own.

Saguru rubs his hands on his face, thinks of home, and it comes to him like barracks and a tent with a bed stinking of late-night sweat and the heat of a French summer, soaked through with rain and with the laughter of the men he knew keeping him company while he writes letters to the parents of the dead; colours pop on his eyelids, and Saguru draws his hands away with a shudder, breathes out, and stares unseeing at a small speck-black cat, sitting in the middle of the hallway, licking a paw, one blue eye, one gold; at Rhys’ back, further and further down, feels the draw-string of his future stretch out in front of him without a guide.

The floor’s cold, when he sinks down, the chill sneaks into his bones, and at least he still feels it. He laughs, soft-whispery-papery; he covers his face in his hands.

With an precious little mew, the cat in front of him paws at his leg.

“Something happened to him, didn’t it?” he tells the cat, and it swims in his vision, blurry with tears, “something that man did to him -- God knows I don’t care, but --- what on earth is this place? What are these people?”

Landry said ‘dead’, Landry said they survive on blood, Landry said that they have families and connections and ties; Landry said so many things and none of them mean anything to him, don’t make a sum total, and if he could take it back - if he could take it back, then, he would. What sort of life is there dead?

But he can’t sit on the floor, at this party, and pretend like he’ll waste away here, become a shadow of his former self, dust on the floor. Saguru hefts himself up to his feet; the cat, a slinky soft shape, curves around his legs.

Graves took him away, and so it’s likely that something in the space of those minutes---

He’s staring at the cat, so intent on thinking that he nearly misses the truth of it; the cat on the floor has one blue eye, one gold, a certain level of intelligence that felines don’t possess, and Saguru goes very still, runs back over what he says, has he said anything that could constitute as problematic---? but before he can reach a conclusion, the cat lengthens, makes a noise like bones splitting, and in front of him, without any clothing but a drape of shadow across his chest and stomach, is Graves.

He’s taller, almost, looks paler, almost, and Saguru regrets speaking aloud to the beast, but the larger part of his curiosity demands him to ask, and so he goes, “what did you do to Rhys?”

Graves doesn’t look surprised, cocks his head to one side, and then sighs deeply, deeply, “nothing irreversible,” he said, “something to keep him from being a danger.”

It’s not an answer, and Saguru hopes Graves can read it in his face, that he’s not impressed by the brush-off he’s given him. It’s enough to make Graves nod, say, “---I removed his memories from the last few months.”

“Why?” says Saguru, “because of what he did to me? That’s insane. That’s---” no word is good enough, comes close enough to what he wants to tell him, and he gapes for meaning like a fish trying to inhale air, comes out with, “it’s _lunatic_ , and it won’t stop him from doing it again, will it?”

“Oh, it will,” says Graves, with such grim authority that he no longer doubts it; Saguru hesitates, though, hesitates saying anything, and then decides that he’s not frightened of this man (no matter what he did to Rhys, what he could do to him, he needs to know).

“How?”

Graves makes a frustrated sound, pulls away from him and dips into a room. For a moment, Saguru thinks about following him, then he returns, fully-dressed, long-legged, and beckons him after him.

He falls into step beside him, follows him to the dancing hall, but before he can open the door, Graves cuts right, to a room that he barely noticed before.

“The Masquerade can’t be put at risk because of one vampire who doesn’t respect our laws,” says Graves. “Should our existence come to light to the human population, it would be tantamount to suicide. We’ll all perish, whether by one of those awful out-dated kits, or weapons of another sort.”

“We?” says Saguru, and in his head, he hears Landry saying ‘dead’, tastes blood on his tongue, too.

How many monsters does it take to make an empire? Graves tells him over drinks, thick and syrupy, champagne that flows like free tongues, and Saguru has to make himself smaller so that his brain doesn’t spiral and crash like a bomber gone rogue: there’s families, there’s lords, there’s ladies, there’s layers upon layers upon layers of sedimentary history laid on top of each other, and he feels he’s just brushed the tip of it as Graves explains to him how the rules work, how easy it is to make a mistake, what happens when you do.

And out of the corner of his eye, he sees Rhys wandering lost down the Lethe of his memory, and he wants to gather him up and go back to a time when none of this happened, and it’s not in response to the voice in his head telling him that Rhys deserved everything, every last bit of every last torment, that he got, it’s something else, something else, it’s something else. There’s nothing but kindness in Graves’ eyes, but Rhys has lost his memories, and somehow Saguru wonders if it would have been kinder to kill him instead of leave him helpless and unsure, leave him without a guardian.

When he goes home, the night seems too long; he feels he’s been at the party for hours, but there are still bold stars in the blackened sky, and dawn is an age away. He sits on the stoop of Rhys’ house, watching a frosting of dew skate down the ironwork, his insides shuddery with loss. If he could take it back, if he could resist the pull of warmth that led him to tumbling into Rhys’ bed for a lick of flame and want, he would, but the past is too far away, and he thinks, dark enough, that maybe he should defy Graves’ words and sit on the step until the sun peeks up and he’s turned to smouldering ash and blown away on the wind.

It’s beautiful, though, tonight, and he doesn’t want to ruin it, doesn’t want it to end. He counts the stars until the numbers lace together in his head, counts the grass blades brushing against the soles of his shoes, is counting minutes in his head when he hears the whispering hiss of fabric, a small muffled sound like a mouse caught by a cat. It’s loud, too loud, and he startles, looks around with his head bandying back and forth, tilting it like a spaniel.

The sound again, and he’s on his feet and moving towards him, one foot in front of the other, down the road to where the houses slumber and alleyways rife with faded posters make homes for vermin. A newspaper crunches underfoot, half-frozen, and blows off down the street, and when Saguru tilts his head again, he can still hear it whipping over the cobblestones and around the corner, and into some other world.

There’s that sound, again, again, closer now, and he can taste underneath it a ripe undercurrent of just-over-the-top, of mud and dirt and piss and blood, and for a moment it’s like the years really do roll back and he’s gasping on mud that’s given out from beneath him, at the bottom of a pit filled with the confetti-dust of his men, watching a sky that shouldn’t have been that blue, that clear, when the world was filled with screaming.

He hits a hard right, starts running; the scent of blood is thick, thick, thick, and he doesn’t want to find its sources, but there’s a pull inside him he can’t resist. The alleyway he’s in spreads out to another road, and there he sees a shadow flicker, a gleaming arch of something hooked and cruel, and before Saguru can think of stopping, he’s barrelling into a man.

Tight hard rough read the whole length of him is rippled with muscle and heavy with clothing and Saguru has a split second to think _knife right hand get it_  before the man jerks his head back.

It’s like he’s moving in slow motion, and he can see the twist-pulse of muscles in his neck flexing as the man goes to twitch his head back, and he moves out of the way so seamlessly it’s like blinking, like breathing, like bleeding, and grabs hold of his right arm. His bones feel distant, spongy; he doesn’t know he’s snapped the man’s wrist like a twig until the screaming on the floor is overlaid with other screaming, closer to his ear.

There’s a blank space where his face is, a mask of some sort that doesn’t quite cover his mouth or the sharpness of his teeth, and Saguru wonders if that is its purpose, to frighten, to worry, to break; wonders if that’s why the woman on the ground is sobbing, but then he smells more blood, more than there should be, and---

His head jags down, and there she is, crying weakly just to their right, and there’s a rubbery length of organ spilling from a tear in her stomach, and Saguru can smell it, can smell it; it smells like mud, organic and alive, like blood left to moulder on stone steps, like rain, and the Somme, and the clap of a bullet into his right shoulder; he can hear the five-nines screaming over his head as he tries to sleep, and the shakes start slowly, subtly, start to the echo-cry-mewl of his men’s shattered names in his head.

In the field it was no time for goodbyes, and he’s lost track of all the men he’s left behind sobbing in the mud and the dirt, lost track of everyone whose screaming turned softer and softer and softer the further and further towards the German war machine they managed to get; and it shouldn’t be here in the middle of London that he can remember details he can’t remember in his dreams, like the way you could grab hold of a hand in the mud and tug and have it come apart like tissue paper, like how you could have your head so full of whistling that it wouldn’t mean anything to tread on softer earth until you looked down and saw the brown-black-red of a British uniform, and Saguru’s hands can’t stop shaking, can’t stop shaking, can’t stop shaking. He fists them together, draws blood when his nails dig in, and this woman on the ground’s weeping and sobbing, and the whole of London has become No Man’s Land, and he’s alone.

“I’m sorry,” he says, scatters himself down to his knees, and the platitudes are dusty and ill-used on his tongue, half-forgotten; it’s like the time he spent away from the battlefield has washed his uniform clean of all blood, except it’s still there on the surface of his mind, rutted and rotten and rusted. “I’m sorry, I’m --- give me your hand, I’ll call someone for help, I’ll---”

(It’s too deep, whispers the medical brain he was training in Cambridge before the started tells him; it’s too deep, he’s cut too far, and the whole of her lower intestine is spilled between her thighs like a snake that’s about to swallow her whole, and he can think about procedures that he learned from a medic with one hand missing and an eye that looked everywhere but at his patients; _sometimes son you have to let them go_ , as a soldier frothing from mustard gas screams and screams and screams---)

Graves tells him it’s a choice, this bite, this thing that they can offer other people; Graves tells him it’s something that they take into account every time they go fangs-first into someone’s wrist neck thighs stomach, every time they take something from them and give something back, propel whatever virus this is into people who don’t know it. It’s in his head to do it, give her the bite, bare his teeth and skin her throat alive with his mouth until he finds the soft, fleshy part where her pulse is a hammer beat.

_Do it_ , and it’s almost like he can see Rhys standing over him, blue-eyed, blue-smiled, watching him like he did on nights at the trenches where he should have known better than to fall for someone as pretty and as popular and as bone-deep corrupt as Rhys, _do it_ , and he can see Graves and the strange magic wrapped around him like warmer air, a pump of something affectionately warped.

He doesn’t. Her sobbing echoes in his head, and he’s in the field again, surrounded by the men he’s lost, holding onto a soldier as he bleeds out in his head. When he closes his eyes, London is France and the ground beneath him is on fire, and the whistling is in his head like a lullaby.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, has to say something to comfort her; her body’s starting to seize and twitch as the blood pools from her, and he can’t imagine the pain, can’t even start to begin what she must be going through, what has to be running through her head, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry---”

It’s not his place to be sorry; it’s not his place to put his pain above this woman’s, but he can’t let her die not knowing that someone here has witnessed it; she isn’t a ghost like the clairvoyants call from the depths of the table-rapping, she’s real, flesh and blood and warmth and life, and it’s guttering out into his hands like candle-flames.

Saguru watches it go, and he’s still in France, not in London, as it goes. Her eyes glaze first, then her mouth grows slack, her breathing shallower, softer; she slips past the pain, and stops twitching, and he can’t get over the slick wet rubbery mess of her stomach and the rendered fat gone yellowy and visible beneath the flap of her skin; he can’t stop looking at it, or her face, which is untouched, almost, perfectly poised. One of her bottom lips still has a scraping of lip colour on it and it’s pathetic. Everything she is has been reduced to scrap parts.

Her body stills, stills. She’s cold when he gets up, cold by the time he brushes his trembling, trembling hands over his mouth, smearing her blood, her scent, all over and into him. The posters littering the alley floor catch his eye - newspaper scraps from national papers, talking about a man stalking people in London and leaving them like trash when he’s done with them, and Saguru stares without seeing the words, just the face of the man he found stood over this woman, just the face of the man who’s no longer here.

He turns his head, scents terror and something rotten. Follows.

It wends, it winds, and Saguru can taste it in the back of his throat, corrupt as split fruit; he follows it down the road to where the street gives out to a broken rubble wall and the edging lip of semi-detached house gardens; there’s a spatter of blood on the ground that feels fresh-spilled, and Saguru stops, dips his fingers into it, feels how warm it still is (it’s the oddest of his new senses, that he only needs to touch blood to know its warmth, to know that it has spilled recently; and when he thinks of putting it into words, it sounds ghoulish so he never does).

Down the road then, over the garden wall and into thigh-high thistles and grass, and he can see a crushed path like a promise breaking through, and he follows it, places his footsteps in where his footsteps are, touches each step quicker and quicker until he’s chasing a scent on the wind, a bloodhound hunting for the last German soldier in the wild woods. Some time later, he skids out to open road, and he sees the front of a house, a dimming light in the upper storeys; he smells that blood on the air like gutted fish spoiling at a market, and he knows.

This is the house where the monster lives, and in the back of his head, it might as well be treasure, gold, something rare, something unknown. He knows they’ve started police forces for less; that people have lynched other people for less, and his father’s primary function as a keeper of the peace might have stopped him if he isn’t still clutched by the dream of France, by the woman’s last pained gasp as she bled out too quick in his arms for him to save.

His father would be proud of him if he went back and informed the police, told them where to go. Dawn is still hours away, though, and evidence dies out so quickly, and Saguru thinks monsters will understand monsters more; that it would be easier and better for them all if he confronted the man who took that woman’s life (he doesn’t know her name and he wishes he did; it would make her so much easier to think of than just a body drying and dying on the cobblestones of London).

So he goes, he goes up the steps, he finds the door locked, but a window half-open; he slips in, and doesn’t mind the pull and scrape of his spine against the juddering line of wood, the splinters it leaves in his hands. He doesn’t mind how it’s like being underwater, like drowning in mud, when he’s inside, his mouth so full of his heartbeat that he has to pant like a dog to get air.

The kitchen, he’s in the kitchen, divided down the middle by a countertop that looks still-new and fresh-packaged, with a selection of small bowls filled with incremental mounds of fruit; there’s chairs, lopsided, shoved everywhere like a hurry, and the floorboard creaks near the stove. He steps out to a living room, just as nondescript, nothing of note but the wall to wall to wall bookshelves filled with titles in different languages, all too blurry by the midnight dark to understand. A staircase juts out into the living room and leads upstairs, and he’s about to follow when he hears, from somewhere almost underneath him, the scrape.

The scrape, the scrape, like nails against wood or metal against metal, or hands brushing something too inorganic to name. The scrape, and he’s left turning his head in all directions like that bloodhound he was before, trying to pinpoint where the shrieking sound comes from.

Below. That’s all his mind can analyze: below, below.

He goes into the hallway. He waits, his head tilted to one side; he waits, his head tilted. It happens again, a scraping like a kiss, and Saguru moves towards the sound, feeling along the wall for a jut where his fingers can slip into, a door that his hand can brace against, and he finds it just underneath the stairs, hollowed out and pressed down by wallpaper, so thinly there that it almost isn’t. When his hand locks around the doorknob, the metal feels electric, and he opens it with a hush, a whisper of paper and wood.

The stink of downstairs swarms him; it smells like blood. All of it smells like blood, spilled, fresh, old, new, like blood, like blood, and if he had the forethought to be horrified by his hunger, he would be, but his head is on a different track and all he can think of is the rain-ragged poster, hanging on a lamppost that has seen better decades, the villain’s sketch of a man with a moustache and black eyes and a grin so curled and wicked it could have been the devil’s, watching him try to put a woman’s insides back inside her. There has to be evidence somewhere, but the lure of the blood is too deep, too much, and it takes him longer than he would admit to pull himself away and take a step back, to look the door.

To jam it with a chair from the kitchen underneath the knob, so that whatever is below is trapped, unable to get out until he has investigated the rest of the house. It’s a compromise, he tells himself; it’s not revenge. Puzzles have always been his forefront, and if he takes a scrap of this mystery and solves it for the woman with no name, then that can be what lays her spirit to rest now.

The kitchen, first, then. Down the hallway again, to the stunted little room where the windows gaped like mouths and the floorboards hummed underneath his feet in their own cacophany. Food rotting in the fridge: jars of indescribable mush, a butter-slick bowl with dough rising in the middle, bottles of beer that had no labels, fruit melting slowly out of shape. Cupboards stocked with pre-war staples, post-war reproductions. Cutlery in a drawer by the sink, gleaming soft, catching the light from every angle. Twice again, fridge, cupboards, sinks, and he nearly missed the knife-block by the stovetop, emptied out and hollowed, a monolith to nothing. When he ran his fingertip over the grain of the wood, he could feel the grooves where the knives would go - but nothing more, nothing else, nothing less.

Out into the hallway, considering the nondescript living room; a preliminary search only took a handful of seconds, left him none the wiser about the occupant of this house; upstairs, next, over a staircase thick-muffled with a carpet, to another branching forest of doors. He stopped, cocked his head to the side to listen, wondered again if he should bell the police - if he could explain himself to them when they got here.

(His father, drinking too much, red-faced in the way that he got only on his mother’s sake, ‘it’s a good job this, honourable, strong, gives you power like you couldn’t imagine - and it’s not all that difficult because we haven’t really had anything to deal with that’s any sodding work---’ and if he got them here could he be guaranteed that this man wasn’t rich enough famous enough known enough to get himself off of here?

Couldn’t, couldn’t, so he didn’t call, left it to the side, and moved to the first door instead).

Mahogany wood glazed shiny, no noise behind it; a bedroom, when he cracked it open, stepped inside over the threshold with only the slightest discomfort in his shoulders, the vaguest blurring of his blood. Thought of Graves, something Graves said, about invitation and intent, but it didn’t seem prudent to remember now.

A diary by the bedside table, filled with nothing, minutae details of days gone past and shopping lists and people needed. Put it down, picked up a surgeon’s book beneath it, gave it a cursory examination, stopped when a scrap of paper fluttered out between the pages and to the floor at his feet, and when he picked it up, he didn’t need to see the stain to know it was soaked through with old blood, rusted over so much that it looked like packing paper.

Crushed it in his grip, felt the blood crackle. It’d left a stain on the page next to an anatomical model, and he traced it out with a fingertip, squinted to read, in the margins, a line of text: ‘angels had wings, and so should we’.

Closed the book, set it back carefully, left the room. The other three rooms - a study, all the books with titles in history and medicine; another bedroom, empty, the window a little open showing a wisp of dawn beyond the blinds; a bathroom, modernized, the claw-foot bath-tub scraping on the floor, stained at the side where something had splashed, splashed, and when he looked at it, the stains seemed to conform to a shape, but he didn’t want to think too closely about it, didn’t want the shape to change his mind.

Looked away, instead, and downstairs, to the door that he hadn’t opened.

Downstairs, the hallway door, and he hesitated, took the chair away; thought again, about calling the police, but until they got here, what would happen? Thought, again, of telling them, but he remembered his father talking about friends of friends of friends and how villains were seen, not created through circumstance (against everything that doctors said today) and he couldn’t bring himself to pick up the phone and dial the number needed, couldn’t bring himself to explain it to someone who might decide that he’d been wrong.

The woman’s face swam into his mind, contorted and twitching in pain, and Saguru pushed the door open, and stared down into the gauntlet of darkened stairs. There were noises beyond, small scuffling like animals, but nothing that spoke of larger creatures.

The stairs didn’t creak on his way down. A series of single, naked light-bulbs dangled above his head, filaments glowing like eyes in the dark. Scraps of white papered the walls, but he kept his eyes ahead, his ears straining, listening for --- something more, anything more, something that said that he’d stumbled on what had fled from the woman.

But then the papers caught his eyes, drew his head around.

He’d thought they’d be posters, more of the same sort that had littered the alleyway; he’d thought it had something to do with vanity and the contemplation of human error and creation, but he’d been wrong.

They were pictures. Hand-drawn, photographed, layered one over the other so that he couldn’t tell where the hand-written began and the mechanical ended; all he could see were faces, eyes gouged, mouths ripped, fleshy paper overlaid onto cheekbones, overlaid onto foreheads, eyes breaking through the mist of writing paper to stare into him. Someone had gone at them with scissors, left sharp gouges where there should have been none, and Saguru couldn’t look away. Too much, too much, too much sharpness, too much cruelty, too much rage.

So much rage, it peeled off of the wall, hung in the air like a miasma, the uncomfortable straining room of a courthouse before a murder charge and life without parole.

The Somme had had that rage, but only in small doses, bite-sized and manageable; not for him, not for the men he led, but he’d been at meetings with men reduced to shrieking incoherent shells of men, slamming hands on tables and spreading paper around like a fog, and Saguru knew how that rage ate and aged and ruined people; how it would own the person with it like a fleck of gold in a miser’s fist.

Stepped back from the board like it would infect, and heard the creak a second before something whipped across his throat and razored pain bit bit bit into his throat, and he let it out in a gasp, a struggling grasping at his throat with his fingers wet and slick and red with blood, staggering away and shouldering himself against the wall, twisting to see the man he’d chased off of his victim.

Skull-hollow cheekbones and a nose broken twice in a fight, low-browed like a Victorian drawing of a villain, high-haired. If he’d worn better clothes, he would’ve blended seamlessly into Graves’ party, into the society his mother ran in, and that was the worst of realising: if he hadn’t found him, would he have suspected him at all?

The pain burbled in his throat, and his stomach opened up like a pit, growled, grumbled, _wanted._

Looked at him, squinted one coal-dark eye, and said, “you’re just a child.”

(He’d been eighteen when they’d drafted him into the army and only because he’d lied and told them that he was older that his father had had him young that he had aged beyond his years; he knew what they did to other boys of lesser backgrounds, how they let them in with a ‘walk about the block and when you come back you’ll be old enough’ but for him, with his money and his statues and his names he couldn’t until he’d threatened and begged and pleaded and finally pulled the silver strings his father always dangled to get himself a position, any position, anything so that he could fight for freedom and valor).

Bit by bit, the pain receding, and he should have been shocked at how quickly, but after the night he’d had and all he’d witnessed, it didn’t seem worth it. Kept his hand there, grasping, feeling the slick trail of blood squeezing out between his fingertips and down his throat.

The man smiles, and he’s not missing a single tooth; there’s something intimidating about the blank-wall perfection of his grin, how every gleaming incisor seems wolfishly sharp. “You’re a very long way from home,” he tells him, and the knife lowers, and Saguru can see now that it’s at least twelve inches long, hooked like a butcher’s pig-spit, the edge serrated. Anyone else, anyone not already dead, would have bled out within seconds - he’s seen wounds like that from knives like that, and Saguru knows, can draw the damage of it in his sleep.

But he is no longer mortal, and he can feel the flesh knitting beneath his fingers, healing over like there was nothing more worrying than a cat scratch; the blood won’t dry, though, won’t stop, and it’s leaving him hungry, leaving him aching, his stomach rumbling in echoes. Feed feed feed feed, a litany, a prayer, and Saguru squeezes his eyes shut, shakes his head to get rid of the voice that sounds like Graves’ then Landry’s then his, his.

“I’m older than I look,” says Saguru, and he steps back until his spine is adjacent with the murder-board behind him, the back of his head resting on (a woman’s face, torn open right down the middle like a surgeon’s drawing) the chipboard, “I have good genetics.” It’s blaise and banal, his words, coming out of his mouth like he isn’t terrified and shaking and screaming on the inside of his skull, but they seem to be coming from far enough away that he can’t control them, can’t think, can’t stop him.

The man smiles, and it’s cold all the way down. “Short life,” he says, and steps.

It’s like watching a cow move, that same lumber, that same bluster; he can see the muscles in his arm tightening like pistol recoil, the way he raises it, how he changes the grip of the blade so it isn’t glancing and tearing, but deep, plunging hot; he sees how he angles his hips so that he’s balancing on the balls of his feet to give himself more power, put all of his driving energy right behind that single blow---

And Saguru moves, half a step, moves and feels the whistle-rush of wind by his ear and the reverberating ‘thunk’ of the knife hitting the chip-board hard enough to sink in and dent. The man smells ripe, wet, death and soil and copper pennies, and Saguru’s mouth waters. His hands slide up, grab his throat, feel the pulse ripple-ripple-rippling underneath his fingers, and squeeze hard enough to almost graze the texture of the bone underneath that thin flap of skin.

Someone, something?, someone screams. It’s far off, and the woman’s in his mind again, floating in front of his eyes, bloody from the throat to the belly, her intestines a length of ribbonwork pulled out from beneath her and collapsed on the ground like the edges of a dress.

_Kill him_ kill him kill him kill him, and he could. The possibility of it, it breathes in him: he could kill him, rip him open, tear him to pieces and nobody would miss him, nobody would suspect him - who could have seen him entering at this hour of the night in a house that was so far out of his way? And would anyone miss him, would anyone look for him, would anyone cry for him (like the woman cried sobbing as her life bled out from her and disappeared into a hundred cracks in the pavement to water the London below London). Saguru lifts him off the ground; he’s childishly soft, childishly small, childishly light.

He’s childishly watching him, and Saguru can see he hasn’t calculated this motion, this moment. His eyes bulge outwards (like mustard gas is in his throat, charring him black from the inside) and his mouth hangs open, and Saguru feels the lure of his blood silky-smooth and hot underneath his fingertips, underneath his crushing grip - he could split him open. Take from him.

Graves hasn’t said anything about taking from the unwilling when the unwilling are evil. Graves hasn’t said much of anything, relying in different ways of ‘you’ll learn, you’ll adapt, I’ll teach you’, without his pretty words overextending themselves to helpfulness, and quite frankly he’s annoyed of being _pushed_  and lied to and told things that make no sense and told things that don’t hold up to the light.

(But the core of him which warped from the war and the blood and from Rhys’ semblance of calm when they sent men out together to their deaths, from the orders and the form letters and the stench and stink of mud that got into his uniform and didn’t wash out at all, the core of him tells him to bite).

“What---” he asks, and Saguru cracks his head back. It bounces off the chipboard, one hard lumpy noise that sounds like rocks cascading in a sock, a modified weapon to take down the German war machine, and then he goes still.

Saguru drops him onto the floor. The room is spinning, hazy at the edges where it seems the light is bleeding into him. The man is crumpled, a doll at his feet, and the women with their mutilated faces watch him like a stage-play audience, flesh-emptied faces judging, commanding, arresting, there, there, there.

England has done a great many good things, but the creation of a dedicated police force is perhaps the crowning achievement. He can’t explain his own self being here, but he can call, concerned, as a neighbour; he can say he followed the blood trail; he can say that he saw a whispering light, came down to find his neighbour unconscious at the bottom of the stairs and the wall of pictures staring at him. There’s too many variables, and one of them has to work, and so Saguru steps away, leaves the man on the floor, and goes upstairs.

There’s a telephone in the kitchen, antique and heavy; the number rings for an eternity, and there is no answer. Saguru hesitates, looks down at the door, and wonders if he has woken yet (should he check?) and tries again - two times, three times. No answer, none at all.

When he pokes his head down the stairs, the man’s still slumped where he is, and Saguru makes up his mind. It’s close to dawn, now, and he cannot risk burning alive, but the memory of the woman bleeding out in the road spurs him on. He goes into the living room, taking down the brocade curtain ties, and heads to the basement. He ties the man up, cursory, simply, fisherman knots, the heavy rope clumsy in his fingers. He hefts him.

He leaves with him, to the soft dim glow of a foggy pre-morning.

It makes the papers nearly immediately. The butcher of Black Street, found unconscious and tethered on the floor, still covered in the smears of drying blood from his latest victims. The policeman who stumbles upon him is lauded for his ingenuity and his skills; the man who finds his victim is celebrated for his iron stomach. No-one asks how an unconscious man made it to the stoop of the London Metropolitan Police Station; no-one asks why there were no witnesses, or why he was unconscious. A crime has been solved, and that is enough.

Lord Alisdair Rathais Hakuba takes the credit for solving the crime of a century, and gives talks at elaborate parties about how it was all due to blood spatter, investigative reasoning, a combination of the two, the pure spirit of the English population. His son is a soldier, people remember; honour runs in the family. If they ask him about his son, Lord Alisdair Rathais has very little to say because they have not spoken for years - he speaks instead about crime and duty and nature and lofty ideals, and his quiet Oriental wife watches and doesn’t speak (the poor thing, between themselves, probably does not speak English).

There are no more crimes immediate to Black Street. Women can wander safely knowing that he has been caught.

But there are always other criminals, in other places, in other moments, with other motives. Police forces are small and squeezed tight for resources, and the end of a war sends sick and worried men back to their homes, and men who’ve found a taste for blood and gore cannot unturn from the wolves they’ve become.

Saguru knows things will get worse before they get better. He visits Craiglockhart, and he talks to his men by night, sneaking in through their windows when their screaming has died down to panting. Some of them recognize him, and many of them don’t, but he gleans from them what King and country has forgotten, where the shattered pieces of men who know the war to end all other wars will lie. He cradles their heads, he listens to them bloody-frothed, he listens to their hungering yearning for home, and he files it away.

He doesn’t see Graves again, not as a man, although sometimes, late at night, Saguru sees a cat with odd-coloured eyes watching him from the highest points, lofty with idealism. Sometimes he sees a larger cat, golden like the sunlight he misses, sleeping on the low walls around the house in the north. When Saguru ventures out to see the disc of the moon, he sees the cats, and he wonders if it’s another judgement, another test; if he’ll wake up one day with all his memories replaced, and the darkness inside his house unfamiliar, and if all he’ll retain will be the field of mud and bone where he buried most of his friends and scattered the last of his will to the wind.

The year dies with a gasp, and nobody speaks of the war anymore. Saguru’s house is condemned; and he hears the builders coming to tear it down brick by brick, and by night, he wanders the hallways and patches up spots where the moonlight is pouring through, aware that he’ll burn if the sunlight catches him unaware; aware that he doesn’t mind. Sometimes he ventures out, to London, all peaks and rooftops glistening with fog, and he’ll stop a crime there, he’ll be a witness here. The police take his offerings. His father suspects something, and Saguru hears him in the daylight that has no more meaning for him, wandering around his house, sometimes raising his voice in the brogue that occasionally would slip when Lord Alisdair drank too much, and he sounded like highland and home.

It’s too easy to let the years melt into nothing, and so Saguru does, in a fugue. London nightlife changes, and he watches it change; the carriages give way to sleeker cars, the fashions warp shorter, the summers are longer and crisper.

Graves visits him every spring. He brings a guest, one of his devoted, their neck unbitten, and he feeds him.

The taste of blood makes him gag, still. It tastes like a grenade going off, a spatter of mud, of fingers gripping looser and looser until the hand falls into the dust. It tastes like tears and mustard gas.

Saguru drinks, anyway.

 

 

It’s spring, or close to spring. Graves enters through the topmost window in his house, and Saguru hears him before he calls; he’s learned to navigate the house by floorboards only, and he knows the distinctive creaking of the upper levels like he knows the colour of his own eyes.

“You need to leave this place,” says Graves. He hasn’t brought food this time; he’s brought Landry, elegant as always, even in workingman wear.

Saguru does not tilt his head up from where he’s sitting. Every book in the library, he’s memorized and read twice, and he’s going through Sherlock Holmes again: it’s unmarked, pristine, new. He can’t remember where he bought it.

Graves doesn’t know how problematic that is, that he can’t remember where he bought it. Saguru remembers everything, has always remembered everything, but all his memories now are the same - he dreams in war whistles and geysering dirt, and when he thinks, he thinks of blood.

“Saguru.” Graves’ voice has the gentleness of a hospital doctor.

“Leave and go where?” says Saguru, quietly. “Leave and do what? Have you seen what I am?”

“I’m very well aware of what you are.” The floorboards next to the fireplace creak, and a second later, there’s a sizzle, a spitting warmth that creeps along his spine and saturates Saguru’s hands. The glow burns, burns, and he squints his eyes against it, puts the book aside, turns his head to see the fire in the grate.

Landry has wood, from somewhere. From where?

Downstairs, there was a store where they kept the firewood but the servants have all left, and he’s alone, alone, in a house that was never really home, a shadow of a shadow of a shadow. And Graves tells him now he has to leave, to go somewhere else, but who would have a man who can’t make new memories, who can’t see the sunlight? Who would have a monster dressed like a man?

“I realize that in some part this is due to my inept handling of the situation,” says Graves, delicately. It makes him sound like a politician, and Saguru crooks up one side of his mouth, and wonders if Graves knows that that used to be his life, that he’s adept at uncoding the double-talk of feel-good-be-good-country-and-spirit. That was why Haig hated him: he couldn’t pull honour on him, and make him swallow it.

“Is it?” says Saguru, and looks up at him; he’s easier to look at than the fire, even if his gold eye is nearly as bright. “Do you mean I am supposed to have an untoward reaction to realizing that the singular person who could have helped me is now facing a fate worse than that which faces me?”

“Rhys is perfectly fine,” says Graves, “I didn’t kill him.”

“You might as well have,” says Saguru, and turns his face away, from the fire, and from him.

Graves says nothing, and it seems like he might have been wondering the same thing, but then the moment passes and Graves sinks into a chair next to his, stares into the fire like he’s him, and it’s as though Saguru can see all the rucked millenia of his existence flashing over his face, seamed into the delicate lines of his mouth and his nose and the hundredfold shadows around his jaw. He looks old and he looks tired, and he looks unbearably sad, and if this is a plight on immortality, it has come too late; Saguru’s pity has dried up somewhere, and he’s not sure how to go about getting a fresh supply.

“I can’t have men who disobey me in such blatant ways,” says Graves, almost pleadingly, like the last bastion of his virtue is Saguru’s own understanding of what he did why he did, “it would lead to anarchy, and surely you would understand this? Would not a man who spread foul rumours under your command---”

Saguru’s head snaps towards him, and he scarcely registers his rising voice, “take a good look at me,” he tells him, and his teeth snap together on the legs of the vowels and bite them through, “do you think that my command was easy to maintain?” Oriental to begin with, rich besides, the fact that his men followed him was a small miracle that Saguru knows he won’t repeat twice. “Do you think they followed me because I showed them something mystical? Don’t throw your pretty words at me and expect me not to read through them - I’ve made my living in lies.” His mother is better at this game, less of a temper that shows; his mother, with her steel-snap eyes, could hone down Graves in two, but Saguru has nothing, not the years of experience, not the years of understanding how to slip between assumptions and build up a wealth of goodwill, not the years of listening to this, and knowing how to parry snide commentary.

Graves looks shocked, like it genuinely hasn’t occurred to him.

Saguru widens his eyes, resists the urge to reach over and grab his chin and make him look, make him see everything that the Somme reminded him: there is no place for him here, or anywhere. Maybe he can charter a boat, head back to the country his mother left the shore of, find the remnants of his family abroad, be strange there instead of strange here, but the thought of being on a heaving ship for months makes him light-headed.

Graves’ eyes slide away from his face, go to the fire, consider it like an old friend. Slide back to him, and then he says, “I---yes. You have a point. Forgive my words - I didn’t mean them in jest or rudeness.” Behind him, Landry bristles.

Saguru knows, knows, that this is an overreaction, that it’s the result of some other feeling left to fester in the back of his mind and build up and become something else, but he can’t---he can’t. There’s a core of him, molten hot and miserable, that’s boiling and burning and bubbling, and Saguru can’t breathe because it’ll crawl up his throat and melt him.

When he looks at the fire, he sees France, he sees France. He closes his eyes, and the names of his dead men are on his eyelids, haunting his every thought, his every sleep. Craiglockhart beckons, but the treatments they put on their men - you wouldn’t use them on dogs, and yet they use them on heroes, no matter their country, no matter their injuries.

Saguru pulls his gaze away from the flames, to Graves instead, who hunches over like a cat, the points of his shoulder-blades pressing against the back of his shirt like folded wings. “…I see it everywhere I go,” says Saguru, and it uncoils from his throat like peeling skin, “…I see the Somme when I shut my eyes. And what do I get when I leave? Everyone seems to have forgotten. I’m---useless. Like this, I’m useless, and I’m---” To his horror, Graves blurs (his father’s hand striking his mouth to the other side and over the crack-snap of skin on skin saying _boys don’t cry stand up straight if that’s how you react to a dead bird how can you_ \---) and he clears his throat and looks away and he doesn’t make a sound.

“Then leave,” says Graves, and there’s gentleness. Saguru thinks of how he looked a few minutes ago, irreperably, brokenly, tired, and wonders at the cost of that gentleness. Wonders at if it’s true, and then wants to laugh. He lives in a world where even gentleness doesn’t serve a purpose; it doesn’t seem real to think about.

“And go where?” says Saguru. “I can’t travel by day. I can’t visit my friends - most of them are dead, or locked up, or as mad as I am. I don’t _exist_. In this world, or the next, I have no identity - a dead man’s face, and a dead man’s memories. Nothing more than that.”

Graves pauses. The cogs in his head are turning, and Saguru can see them, one by one, orienting to thoughts that Saguru cannot fathom.

“Go to Paris,” Graves finishes, and Saguru wants to stand up, strike him, throw him from the house.

“I beg your---”

“There are people in Paris who might help you,” says Graves, speaking over him like he’s a brat child in need of disciplining (dark cupboards locked up tight from the outside and the servants ordered not to pay him any attention until his mother gets home and lets him out and finds his father in the study and draws blood with a look a word a paperweight flung to catch his shoulder), “if not with your---unique situation, then with what Rhys has done to you.”

It’s magic, that phrase, that saying; it sings. “You know of these people?”

Graves breathes in, collecting himself. The firelight makes wings behind him, and Saguru thinks that perhaps he can see why there is a lure to this life - does everyone in Graves’ company live and die by his exacting standards? - and why people would give their arm their leg their life for immortality, but he has been the last man in a dying field, and he has wanted no better than to join his friends and whet his brain from what it was left to imagine reimagine the moments that he spent waiting for another bullet another bomb a gunshot that would take him away, take him away.

“There’s a boy,” says Graves, and settles into his chair.

When he was younger than a commander should have been, Paris was a haze of buildings in the distance on the way to the south of France, and Ypres and the Somme have wiped most of the recollections of it from his mind; he thinks he knows a building somewhere near the Arc de Triomph, but time has blurred his life so that he’s not sure if it’s black or blue or grey or something of all three.

Graves charters him a boat that goes by night, spills him into the hold, and tells him not to resurface until the captain tells him to. He’s not allowed to take anything -- “You’re staying at my house, I’ll provide the rest,” says Graves, shucking blinds over the windows -- and when he protests and asks if he can at least visit the men to say goodbye again, Graves says that they will be there when he returns, if he returns, if he chooses to return.

England disappears, and he doesn’t see it go. The boat rocks and things flicker in the water too quickly for his eyes, and he’s left alone with his thoughts to unpiece the urgency of what Graves has told him.

He knows people in Paris, that’s true. He has family friends, old names of his mother’s that would take him in. He doesn’t have to rely on Graves’ hospitality, on Graves’ fluid mannerisms and Graves’ promises. Something in the back of his head which has not stopped screaming since Rhys bit him and bound him to the night tells him that there’s a trap, that there’s something in Paris that will destroy him, that Graves is more than he seems, that he could have argued, that he could have---

Could have done what? In the end, his house is full of ghosts, his country is a haunting, and he has nothing to tie him to England but the spate of crimes left packaged for the police, and even then---even then.

There is a thin line between evil and goodness, and Saguru no longer knows which side he falls on. So much of him has been wiped clean from his memory; there is ever only France, stretching burning in his mind.

He’s disgorged onto a dock and into a car, he’s sent scattering through streets that look half-destroyed, houses that need painting. The driver doesn’t speak to him, and all Saguru can see of him is his hands on the wheel, gloved and long-fingered, twitching away from people on the streets. Paris has electrical lights, smoke pouring from the gutters. He can’t reconcile it with the smashed-up buildings and the dwindling people trailing off to their homes; he can’t reconcile it with Ypres.

Graves’ apartment is on a double-block of buildings, and the driver comes with him, and lets him in with a gold key around his neck, which he snaps off and hands to him like dead weight. He leaves before Saguru can say goodbye, drifting into the darkness like so much shadow, and Saguru’s left alone to heft the one solitary bag he’s brought with him into the flat, hovering towards the smell of dust and closed windows. Electric lights come on as he goes, and Saguru whips his head around automatically, searching for the gap in the curtains, but there is none. They’re heavy and velvet, unlikely to let the light in.

He drops his bag by the coat-stand, locks the door, and double-checks it, and drifts through the house, memorizing it, knowing he’ll forget it in the morning and wake up shaking, ready to go over the top.

There’s a bedroom to his right, and a living room directly ahead of him. Other doors show a library, heavy with books, a balcony with windows discreetly curtained and shadowed, the glass tinted like gunsmoke to disrupt the flickering sunlight. The bathroom is gigantic, with a claw-footed bath-tub disappearing in a corner.

A silent, black-eyed maid appears next to the kitchen, and says nothing. Her teeth are too long to be human, and she reminds him of his mother’s warnings about broken-hearted women and their early deaths.

He leaves her standing sentinel, and moves to the bedroom, the ridiculous, over-stuffed four-poster, the wall of mirrored glass where Paris stretches out beneath him. The hubris of a vampire with tinted glass everywhere makes him laugh as he draws the velvet curtains tight, and then sinks into bed.

Somewhere in Paris, there is a boy who can take him, unmake him, rebuild him.

He just has to find him.


End file.
